Stefan Both Posted December 28, 2014 Share Posted December 28, 2014 Dear all, I'm preparing my MyIDE-II for the next exhibition. One of the partitions is filled with TIP animations from atarionline.pl. (those XXX too ) I made different Mem settings on my Ultimate. The conclusion is: When itś a version 2.7 or 2.8 of TIP the animation, the Video plays fine. Each time the Version shown in the picture "plays", it freezes. Is there an easy possibility to change the Version / or use a higher Version of the Player as "standallone" and choose the .xex file? Greets Stefan Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+CharlieChaplin Posted December 28, 2014 Share Posted December 28, 2014 (edited) Hello Stefan, the TIP animations were all created on the PC with a tool named TIP-Animator (by TeBe). This tool takes several TIP pictures or better frames and converts them into an animation. The output is always a *.XEX file, which includes the "player" and the animation as one single XEX-file, thus -as of now- it is not possible to have a separate player and animation. The bug you mention is known to me - but not in the way you describe it. There are two main versions of TIP animator: 1) version 2.9 (or older versions like 2.8, 2.7, etc.) which works on 64k-1088k machines, it does not use double-buffering, it can convert lots of frames into an animation, but when the pics change too much you get flicker (or even frame drawing); after loading and depacking, the animation displays fine on the screen instantly 2) version 2xB (the PC program is available as versions 1.0, 1.1 and a fixed version 1.1), which works on 128k-1088k machines, it uses double-buffering (2xB = 2x buffer), cannot convert as many frames into an animation as version 2.9 (or 2.8, 2.7, etc.), when the pics/frames change a lot, you don`t get any flicker thanx to double-buffering; after loading and depacking, the animation often (nearly always!) shows garbage on the screen, but this garbage more and more disappears - in 99% of cases it is gone, when the animation re-starts... I also have two 800XL computers with U1MB and none of the animations did freeze, when I loaded them there. But I always used 5,25" / 3,5" diskettes or ATR-images (with SIO2PC or SIO2SD), I never used the XEX loader of U1MB or MyIDE-2 and that might be a reason why some animations freeze. All TIP animations I created used memory page 7 upwards, page 4 and page 5 were used by Superpacker/Exomizer as depack-space and buffer and errm, page 6 was used for all 128k-1088k animations as a title-screen (in the 128k animations only displaying "loading", while in all 320k-1008k animations it display the title). I guess the XEX-loader of the U1MB or MyIDE-2 uses page 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 (most likely page 4 or page 5) to load the animation and thats why it freezes (because of memory collision). When using SIO2SD you must set "turbo mode" to off otherwise the tip animations will not load... Some months ago JAC! was able to fix *one of the bugs* of TIP animator 2xB, so many animations can be viewed bug-free (without garbage after depacking) - if the fix had been added (appended) to the animation (the *.XEX file). Since I have more than 800 TIP animations in the meanwhile, I have not had the time to add this fix to all animations yet, created with version 2xB. And errm, the animations at atarionline.pl are all older versions (I created lots of newer/better versions in the meanwhile). Alas, the fix does not repair all bugs of TIP animator 2xB and neither TeBe nor me are motivated to do anything about it. [in the meanwhile my WIN XP PC has died and after several weeks I got a new one with Win Vista. I hate Vista so much, I am gonna install Win XP again, as soon as I find the time to do it. To me Win Vista shows the same behaviour as DOS XE - it always asks several times if you are really sure you want to do a certain operation, but instead of showing "press Start to continue, Option to abort" it shows a window with two buttons "Abort" and "Allow". Several programs that worked fine under Win XP do not work under Vista, even when I run them in XP mode; quite often Vista tells me, that only the Administrator can execute certain operations - but I am the Administrator, etc. etc. To make a long story short, when WIN XP is installed on my PC again I will continue fixing the many buggy TIP animator 2xB versions and lots of other A8 things that worked great under XP but do not work under Vista...] Attached are the latest versions (PC programs!) of Tip Animator - TeBe did not change the version numbers, so don`t be surprised if you still see version 2.8 (instead of 2.9) and 2xb version 1.1 (which should be 1.2, since it is a fix of 1.1). These PC programs can only create the TIP animations, they cannot change a finalized animation (XEX-file), but you can try to add/append the short "Fix1.XEX" with Superpacker to any of your tip animation XEX files (at the end of the XEX file). You can even create a batchfile to add the fix to dozens or hundreds of TIP animations... Greetings, Andreas Koch. P.S.: If you have more questions, write a pm, so we can talk in german language... tip_animator.zip super_packer_exomizer.zip Edited December 28, 2014 by CharlieChaplin Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stefan Both Posted December 29, 2014 Author Share Posted December 29, 2014 Dear Andreas, I did not understand everything told me. (I fully agree with your Vista problem To me, it just means, I have to sort out all the newer animations?! I give your mention a try and use sio2sd without highspeed. Lets see... Thank you Stefan Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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