What sort of speed has Blitzbasic for HAM6 anim playback?

[ImmortalA1000]

(probably talking about 240x135 pixel anims)

I notice that Blitz BASIC supports playback of anim files but could somebody tell me what sort of speed will I get. Would I get the same speed on a standalone ANIM player like that with Dpaint IV? Also is it uncompressed ANIM5 (?) format only or the later ones that offered some compression in the ANIM file coding too?

Also can I have an anim file loading whilst one is playing (under interrupt?) as for longer sequences I thought I would split the ANIM and SVX files into chunks of 192kb combined so I would need a consistent speed regardless of whether a file is physically being loaded in or not.

What sort of accuracy in frames/second or VBLs will I get to be notified by Blitz program code that an ANIM has finished being played once, assuming this is also possible, so I can string together a consistent start stop of the 192k blocks of AV data. Ditto for notification of end of sample playback on a hardware sound channel.

Finally I'd like to ask if I can reserve a specific portion of 512k chip memory so I can load in ANIM/SVX file into specific addresses (SVX file first as that is always uncompressed) and just swap between two blocks of 192k continuous chip RAM for loading/playback.


Had this crazy idea of doing a simple HD game for 1mb OCS Amigas based on the 1999 movie Payback. The tech specs are fine for the chipset but I have no idea if there is a frame accurate language I can use to write the game engine and if the data transfer rates of hard drives circa late 80s people bought for their Amiga 1000 (I'm only interested in doing Amiga 1000 compatible games).

Thanks for any info, it's been almost 3 decades since I loaded up Blitz!

[Samurai_Crow]

Generally, HAM6 anims don't compress well because the HAM formats are compressed framebuffer images in the first place. As such, CDXL doesn't waste processor time with ineffective compression techniques but streams with audio from a hard drive or CD-ROM drive. That might help your plans.

I can't comment on anything specific about Blitz but if you ask a moderator nicely, you can get this thread moved to the coders.blitz forum category. Then you can get some Blitz Basic specific help.

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by Samurai_Crow

Generally, HAM6 anims don't compress well because the HAM formats are compressed framebuffer images in the first place. As such, CDXL doesn't waste processor time with ineffective compression techniques but streams with audio from a hard drive or CD-ROM drive. That might help your plans.

I can't comment on anything specific about Blitz but if you ask a moderator nicely, you can get this thread moved to the coders.blitz forum category. Then you can get some Blitz Basic specific help.

I was going to use the power of modern Windows PCs to fix that exact issue by isolating and cropping out the areas that aren't supposed to change at all with just the animated portion of each frame to save bandwidth and space. Essentially the way you would do it on a game engine with static backgrounds and some blitter objects for non HAM based games.

Today in the world of casual digital video processing even the cheapest APU based desktop PCs can do, it's really the best way to go to give your 150kb/s Amiga OCS hard drive/CDTV CR-ROM a chance of doing anything efficiently. Very labour intensive but if you're going to something you might as well do it right

[Samurai_Crow]

The IFF Anim format does that but HAM6 is not the tool for that job. One thing you might try is changing palette entries mid-screen using the Copper coprocessor. That'll stretch your palette without the unpredictable side-effects of HAM color fringing due to conflicting video compression techniques. It can be accomplished using the PCHG hunk in the IFF standard but trying to find an Anim player that supports it is difficult due to its late addition to the standard.

[ImmortalA1000]

As was always the case back then, pulling in 50 frames of video into VLab to produce 50 HAM6 frames to make an animation with using even S-Video will not produce that effect so you animation player is actually picking up loads of garbage/noise from the process of creating digital animations using analogue sources. I would have to do exactly the same thing manually to each of the 50 frames etc in Dpaint...it's just faster to do it on my PC today and then run the edited frames through something like HAM Convert app so that 80% static background is going to be rendered 100% identically in all frames by HAM Convert.

Shoving in the 50 frames sourced directly from Vlab into Dpaint....you are animating the noise in the 'static' background and wasting limited hard drive bandwidth with excessive delta changes needed. Amiga actually gets better with age, it's like using a Quantel Paintbox with an Amiga 1000 back in the mid 1980s. Digital Video of today makes desktop video on Amiga move to another level and makes even more of its amazing multimedia talents.

You get the same improvements by feeding your original Digi-view via the composite output of a digital camera and cycling through digitally separated RGB splits of a professionally scanned piece of art VS messing about with some desk lamps with yellowish bulbs or harsh flourescent tubes and uneven lighting via a security camera lined up just 179/181 degrees to the horizontal etc. HAM is the most fussy screen mode for garbage in garbage out situation of using analogue inputs to make digital art/video.

What took days with security cams and less than 100% perfect lighting takes minutes now using the same Digi-view hardware I bought in 1987. I figure the same improvements can be brought to the HAM animation field by pushing the input to beyond professional quality of even the late 1990s.

Same reason why I wouldn't pay more than a penny extra for a fully working toaster system to stick inside an Amiga, analogue video is obsolete this century.

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

You get the same improvements by feeding your original Digi-view via the composite output of a digital camera and cycling through digitally separated RGB splits

Clever! Perhaps it's time for me to exhume my improved Digiview circuit and design a new PCB for it.

[ImmortalA1000]

I have somehow acquired 3 of them over the years, two Digi-view Gold A500/2000 parallel port spec units and one original A1000 spec unit.

I've never had the chance to try it, don't have any HDD equipped Amigas at the moment either. I am kind of stuck with using Windows/JAVA tools like HAM Convert.....which gives stunning results and outputs HAM IFF files to use on a real Amiga. On a real CRT these images would look even better I am sure.

Would be nice if there was something as cheap and simple as the C64 SD2IEC (which you can use as a massive hard drive with lots of SEQ/DEL/PRG files in a root directory and not just open 1541/1581 disk images).

Not even sure how feasible it is to attempt adding a HDD/mass storage device to the A1000, the GOTEK is not really a replacement for a HDD Amiga setup.