Re: Apple II lores GR "movies"

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

frank_bklyn wrote:

<snip cool description of process>

> 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.

With data rates of less than 2KB/second, you may find it advantageous
to compress the information sent over the link and use the Apple to
decompress it.

For example, you could send only relative x,y locations and new pixel
values, which would capitalize on the fact that most pixels do not
change from frame to frame.

This "assembly" of the next frame could be done in the display page
that is not currently being shown, and then you could flip to the
new page when it is time to show it (assuming that you can always
finish assembling the page before it should be shown).

This kind of compression (and/or others) should pose little
computational load on the Apple, and should allow higher
frame rates.

-michael

Music synthesis for 8-bit Apple II's!
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

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