Re: Apple II lores GR "movies"

["Simon D. Williams" <bb065@chebucto.ns.ca>]

On 23 Sep 2005, frank_bklyn wrote:

> 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

Sounds very cool... I can host the files on my crumbly old server if you
want.
-s

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