These programs will allow you to create and play
larger animations by storing the frames in your
computer and on disk in a compressed format.

The pictures/frames are loaded into computer
memory still compressed, the only time they are
decompressed is when they are shown on the screen.
In order for this to work well decompression must be
very fast.

My ealier upload, COMPRESS.ARC, was ok for displaying
pictures but was not quite fast enough for animations.

Anim_com.prg will compress the pictures/frames at
about 1/3 of a second each. But this has nothing to do
with the animation speed.

Anim_ply.prg will decompress and display the pictures/frames
at less than 1/10 of a second each. This, of course, has
everything to do with the animation speed.
10+ frames per second animation is certainly fast enough
for most animations unless you like to play back your
animations at supersonic speed.

Although the compression ratios are not as good as my
earlier programs in COMPRESS.ARC, these new programs
leave more free computer memory witch more than makes
up for the larger files.

There is a bug in GFA basic, my program or the ramdisk
program that I use that makes Anim_ply.prg crash (error 15)
when I try to load an animation from the ramdisk. The same
animation file saved onto a disk drive loads and runs fine.
You can create the animation from the ramdisk but can't run
it from there. (at least not from the ramdisk that I use)

These programs were written with GFA basic 2 and DEVPAC ST 2

Well enough of this, I need a new project. Guess i'll
go look at the "PROGRAMS WE'DE LIKE TO SEE" topic.

Mike Hughes.