Re: Encoding GIFFs on an Apple II

["mdj" <mdj.mdj@gmail.com>]

Simon D. Williams wrote:

> Well, I was hoping for a simple method of producing graphical web content
> on an 8-bit Apple... compression is probably an unnecessary complication
> as the files would be small by todays standards anyway. At this point it
> seems relatively trivial to encode the image data uncompressed, but there
> are a few things in the file header that I don't understand as yet. Might
> have to put this on the back-burner (I need a bigger back-burner!)

Well, the primary thing you want to do is minimise I/O waiting. Simple
RLE will work pretty well for most Apple II graphics, resulting in a
smaller image size for little computational overhead.

Ideally you'd want something you can decompress from a stream, rather
than having to buffer the whole thing, but both LZW and RLE will work
pretty well for this.

Matt