#VESA Blues / Help
8 messages in this thread
I would appreciate some advice about whether or not ANI-PRO is an
appropriate product for what I have in mind. I originally purchased
Animator but found that the limitation of 320×200 did not allow me to do
what I needed. Recently I upgraded to ANI-PRO but am sure having some
trouble with it. What I want to do is: 1. Explain the operation of some
instrumentation (vacuum systems and pressure measurement systems). These
would not be unlike the demo of the internal combustion engine which is
included with ANI-PRO. Text windows would open at each important point and
explain what is happening.
2. Demonstrations of instruments which could be distributed to potential
purchasers. These would include general descriptions of the product and
pointing out important features. Some animation would be included which
would show some operations of certain aspects. It would be essentially a
VGA slide show with some simple animation.
Now I thought that ANI-PRO was going to be my ideal environment. But after
purchasing the upgrade a couple of weeks ago, I have yet to be able to run
the program in 640×480 mode. I have finally today gone out and bought a
new VGA board (ATI VGA WONDER with 1Meg) and in spite of loading the VESA
driver that came with it, I still only get garbage or error messages when I
try to change to 640×480 mode.
If anyone has any ideas I would appreciate some help. I will probably hear
that Panacea's product is going to be my answer. When doesn't the VESA
that comes with this $300 video board work?!
The other concern I have is that this. I wonder how anyone can ever
distribute a FLC to other people to view in 640×480 mode. ??? It would be
a miracle for the average user to happen to have the appropriate VESA
driver handy to be able to view the FLC! Is ANI-PRO a reasonable product
for building such demo FLC's and distributing them with the player for
people to view? If not what is an appropriate product for this kind of
use?
Thanks for any suggestions anyone can offer! Bob J.
AniPro will work perfectly for your application.
Two things:
1) The VESA driver that came with your ATI board is bogus. Delete it and
download VESA.ZIP from DL5 here in the forum. It includes a VESA driver
for the ATI that will work fine. This will get you up and running in
640×480 mode immediately.
2) Graeme Devine (of Trilobyte) is a member of this forum and the author
of PLAY. PLAY is a script-based .FLC player that's less than 20K and will
be perfect for distributing your animations. You can download a shareware
version of PLAY from DL9 (look for the most current version).
If you have any more questions, feel free to ask. That's what we're here
for.
– Gary
Thanks very much for the information about the VESA driver and about PLAY.
I will give both a try. It is really helpful to have help from people who
have a lot of experience like is found on this forum. Thanks very much.
I stil don't exactly understand whether it will be practical to expect
people who might receive a "demo" FLC from me to have the a VGA board with
enough memory to be able to run the FLC. I have been trying to get some
things to run on a Toshiba 3100sx which uses Paradise chips but it does not
have enough video
ram to run in anything but 320×200. It would really be nice to have a
version of ANI-PRO which would run at 640×480 with say on 16 colors. This
might be something that could run on many systems. Very few (none that I
know of) portables or standard systems come with more than about 256K of
video RAM. Yet I receive demos from companies and run other graphics
programs in 640×480 with no problem on a 256K RAM machine. Perhaps they
only run with 16 colors but so what at least they are useful to more than
just a precious few people.
I too thought ANI-PRO would be a perfect way to do what I want. But at this
point the requirement for heavy duty VGA is still somewhat of a potential
problem when it comes to distribution of the FLC's.
Thanks again! Bob J.
Again, no problem. Trilobyte's PLAY program will play FLC's quite well
directly off the hard disk… No extra RAM required!
Check it out and I think you'll be pleased.
– G
Thanks, I downloaded it this afternoon and will be trying it tonight. If
indeed it will allow the playing of 640×480 FLC's with video RAM of less
than 512K then I certainly will be very pleased. Thanks very much for all
the help! Bob
You might want to look at Grasp as well. I don't know about Play, but a
Grasp script can conditionally check for the resolution of the display and
execute different FLC files depending on what it finds. You can even opt
to not use any FLI files at all if you encounter a CGA display.
-GB-
Thanks very much. I was actually unaware that GRASP could play Animator
FLC files. I purchased GRASP a couple of years ago. I never could make
GRASP do much. I know it must be a very powerful program but I admit to
not being much of a programmer. Animator certainly seems to be more
understandable to me. Anyway I will certainly take a look at GRASP. I am
sure that my copy of GRASP must be version 1.0 or so. I will look into
later versions. Thanks again! Bob
The current version of Grasp is version 4.5. GO GRASP for more.