[Olaf Barthel]

Originally Posted by Leandro Jardim

I would like to give two suggestions and one bug report.

First, the two suggestions:

* Multiview works as an ANIM player, albeit it is slow (I have not tested it with graphics cards), and reads the entire ANIM to RAM. Do you think in the possibility to update Multiview and the datatypes to play animations from the hard-disk, at the real speed, now with the new OS 3.2?

I believe that the current behaviour is the best compromise, given how MultiView, the animation.datatype and its anim.datatype/cdxl.datatype classes are designed to play together.

The animation.datatype provides general access to and control over how animation frames are retrieved and played back, along with sound, if available. This generalization "has teeth" in that what does not fit within its boundaries will invariably suffer.

For example, CDXL and IFF-ANIM playback are made to fit the same restrictions in spite of the makeup of these file formats being radically different. You could stream CDXL video/audio data on a double-buffered display, but IFF-ANIM type 5 and its descendants requires triple buffering, for example. Some animation file formats offer random access to the entire time frame (CDXL), some do not (IFF-ANIM type 5 and its descendants).

It may make better sense to consider how MultiView and animation.datatype handle animations as providing a "preview" of the animation, with dedicated tools being much better suited to proper playback which plays to the strengths of both the respective format and the Amiga.

* For users that run Workbench on a color mapped OCS/AGA screen, would be best if Multiview for OS 3.2 had a menu item to select the color and the dithering precision for pictures and animations displayed on the Workbench screen.

I think we don't yet have a menu, etc. for choosing the quality of the animation/image/sound, but it could be added along with more general controls for the classes which affect the choice made.

And now the bug report:

* I am using the old MagicMenu 1.29 (very similar to the version used by Bloodwych in ClassicWB LITE). But it have some incompatibilities with Intuition, which hopefully are fixed when I install ObtainGIRPort.lha. Unfortunately this patch is incompatible with the external Intuition library that lets the user drag windows out of screen. With the new library, AmigaOS crash when I drag the horizontal slider of any Workbench window to any direction.

I understand that MagicMenu 1.29 is a too old program to support in the new OS, and the bugged program here is MagicMenu, not OS 3.1.4, but then I thought, I will at least try to ask for a kludge in the new OS to fix MagicMenu, since MagicMenu is a much used program by everyone, and the crash did not happen on the old OS 3.0/3.1.

MagicMenu 1.29 goes way back to 1993 (I just checked my archives). It has its share of problems which are really hard to resolve at the operating system level because it second-guesses the behaviour of Intuition. Invariably, these design aspects will collide with how Intuition deals with the menu rendering, among other things. This is why MagicMenu versions 1.30-2.31 and beyond were created over the course of 7-8 years, which play nicer with the operating system. That's a lot of change, in the right place, which is hard to retrofit into the operating system. We need to choose our battles, so to speak...