CompuServe Messages

Charles, sorry to bear bad news, but…. since you are in HAM-E mode, your 352×220 images are actually 704×220 to the system (remember?)…. so in uncompressed format you have: 704×220 = 154,880 pixels / 8 (bytes) * 4 (bitplanes) = 77,440 RAM per image * 25 frames = 1,936,000 RAM needed for uncompressed page flipping. So, with a 1meg chip ram machine, you can store about 10 frames or so in chip ram buffers for page flipping. With a 2meg chip ram machine you might be able to store 22-25 frames, depending on other uses, fragmentation, etc. The Director will allow you to allocate these buffers, and page flip them *real fast* for you, if you can get them in chip ram. Unfortunately not even the Director is very swift are page flipping when the buffers are in Fast ram (about 4 fps with above image sizes). 🙁 Like Paul suggested, you might try DPaint in its uncompressed anim mode; what speed difference do you see? PageFlipper PF/X will not do uncompressed anims, but is about 10-25% faster than regular anims, at a cost in size. (wow! You could get 4.75 fps!) There is a shareware anim player called TIV in the BlackBelt library in AmigaVendor that purports to play regular anims faster than ShowAnim, etc…. Other misc thoughts: did you lock the palette when rendering to HAM-E mode? Do you *need* overscan? (the same images above without oscan are only 64,000 bytes, a 21% savings) All-in-all, you are faced with comprimises. Are you *sure* you don't want to give away your graduated background? 🙂 –jp–seattle–