Apple II lores GR "movies"

["frank_bklyn" <frank_o_rama@hotmail.com>]

If anyone's interested, i've finished working an a few 'movies' that
flip through 34 frames on the lores screen by swapping banks of memory.
I exported video frames from Quicktime and then ran the resulting files
through Photoshop CS to resize to the 40x48 GR resolution and change
the colors to the Apple II palette. Photoshop saves them as indexed
bitmaps where the hex numbers in the file correspond 1-to-1 to the
lores colors. Then those frames get crunched down in Virtual II and
saved as two binary files that each include half of the 34 total
frames. lastly, i wrote a simple program in assembly that copies the
frame from high memory into video memory and cycles through each one of
the frames. So, you'd BLOAD the 2 video files and then BRUN the player
program. the video is blocky, but flows relatively smoothly.
interestingly, the further you are from the monitor, the better it
looks. probably 100% related to how low the resolution is.

Unfortunately, I don't have a website to host the file, but if anyone
is interested in looking at the code/running the disk images, i'd be
happy to email you a ZIP file with a readme and 2 DSK files. You could
probably even run much longer movies if you're one of the lucky ones
who has the CFFA card. Or, use 80-column 'double lores'. In addition to
the disk images, I have palettes and actions for converting the frames
from JPG to A2. The only part that isn't automated right now is
stripping Photoshop's metadata from the bitmapped TIFF files (any perl
experts/data mungers out there?). This is intended as a start to a
system that uses a PC to serve 'video' in real time via the serial
port. 19,200 baud should be fast enough for 2 or 3 frames per second of
continuous 'streaming' video as long as the PC handles the front-end
data conversion/data hosting.

cheers!

Frank
frank_o_rama@hotmail.com