CompuServe Messages

Hi Robert, Well, I wrote GIF quite a long time ago, and there are other GIF datatypes out now that are MUCH faster. I write in C and use the OS routines, but you can get ones written in asm that bypass the OS routines. Obviously, us OS-legal programmers cannot really hope to get even close in speed to these techniques, and so I moved on to other things. I *could* release the manual mode id set version of the datatype, but there isn't really an elegant way of doing it. The approach I used is to supply the images I wanted to change with an icon, and then to use the icon tooltypes to specify a mode id. It has to be said though, that this is less than user-friendly, as the mode ids are hex numbers, and you have to know which number corresponds to which mode. To answer your other question, I don't know of any articles/books on writing datatypes. They are just special types of Amiga library, and really quite easy. What I have done with other people is to send them a copy of the source code of V39.1. Much of the shell code is reusable. The only downer here is that I wrote GIF before I really *understood* what they were, and so the code is unecessarily complicated. Steve the G. [BEDFORDSHIRE, UK]