CompuServe Messages

AAWIN V1.1 is not going to put image chunks on the screen any faster than the last version. The slowness of playback under windows is not under our control. Holding the arrow key down seems to speed things up because its killing any kind of frame delay. The frame delay is there to make sure you at least get to see the frame in its entirety for some specifed number of 1/70 second intervals. By holding down the key, you are only seeing frames in the middle of being updated, AAWIN never lets you see the completed frame. This may work well for some flics, but on others you could miss may frames as they go whizzing by faster than you eye can follow. Playback speed under windows is slow for many reasons. Here are some: 1. The data transfer rate between the hard drive and the display, via the bus, limits the number of pixels per second that can be transfered to the screen. This can be improved by various local bus VGA systems but not entirely eliminated. 2. You may have a terribly slow and badly written display driver. 3. When your animation contains frames in it that are larger than 64k in size, Windows has to go through extra steps to manipulate it. This brings a noticible slowdown on all systems. Of course, moving any kind of data around in Windows is going to be slower than a pure protected mode program like AAPRO galloping unfettered through the fields of your systems memory. Windows 3.1 will improve problem number 3 somewhat, and maybe number 2. A faster processor will do this as well. In the future, NT will be able to speed things up a bit, as it imposes less overhead on its applications. Furthur innovations in display technology will also work to improve the situation, but they may come at the cost of replacing entire systems to take advantage of the new technology. There are display cards and systems in the MCI and MPEG domain that can address this issue in a different way by compressing the data so there is not so much to move around.