#AAWIN.EXE
3 messages in this thread
I just downloaded AAWIN V1.1 and tried it , although it has prettier
buttons I don't really see any performance improvements. Now I'm not a
great windows fan (especially as nothing worth using runs under it) but I
have V3.0 just for checking things out. Running on a 486 25 16mb. machine
at 800×600 with an Oak SVGA with 67Vesa.sys when playing a (loaded) flic
the playback is jerky but improves if the right arrow key is held down !
and there are some oddities in the display.
my questions are …..
Will V3.1 windows improve things?
Will Multimedia extensions help? …. on the same machine I can run the
same animation very fast with aaplayhi, at least 36 fps.
Can I get better results by using the .DLL from my own program?
Will a different display driver help? I see some tearing and occasionally
bits of a moving object get left behind or translated to a different part
of the screen! and stick there!
All in all it is as much use as a chocolate teapot, as it currently stands
(for higher resolutions at least)
This is not a flame, I'm sure things will come together. It's just that I
like to know what my options are.
On a similar point I'm just about to install AAplayhi on a clients
HP486/33U.
HP say I need the Vibrant driver to make it work so I have ordered that,
anybody got any thoughts or experience of this beasty?
Grahame
Graham, I'm afraid you've got the wrong guy. I don't have anything to do
with the windows flic playback stuff.
– G
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.