1aaflip -- an ascii arted flic player for aalib 2Version 0.3 3This is modifies version of flip(flic animation file player, see bellow) 4that works in text mode. 5 6ORIGINAL FLIP README 7==================== 8 9 10flip -- a flic file player for the Linux console 11Version 0.3 12By John Remyn 13 14This is a non-X flic animation file player for Linux. A VGA compatible card 15is required. 16 17Flic files can usually be recognized by the .fli or .flc extensions at the 18end of their filenames. Fli files are limited to a resolution of 320x200, 19while flc files can have any resolution. 20 21The binary requires svgalib to be installed (svgalib can be found at 22sunsite.unc.edu: /pub/Linux/libs). 23 24The default method of playing is to load the first frame of the animation 25sequence and display it. After this the remainder of the flic file is loaded 26into memory, and the animation starts. The animation ends when q or ctrl-c 27is pressed. There are some flags that control the way the flic file is 28handled: 29 30-a Remove frames from memory after processing. Using this option 31 leaves more memory for other processes, but relies on the buffer 32 cache for continuous animation. 33 34-b Process frames immediately as they are loaded. When using this 35 option the animation frames are shown as soon as the player has read 36 them, so you don't have to wait until the entire file has been 37 read. The disadvantage is that the animation becomes jumpy if the 38 speed set by the animation is higher than the speed of loading. 39 40-c Keep the screen black while loading the animation. This conflicts 41 with option b, which can give interesting results. 42 43-f This removes the clock synchronization. This is just for fun, so 44 you can show off the speed of your computer :-) 45 46-n <number> 47 Play the flic file <number> times. 48 49-s <delay> 50 Sets the delay between frames to <delay>*0.01 seconds. Option -s 0 51 is the same as -f. 52 53- Causes flip to read the flic file from stdin. Using this with option 54 -a may cause trouble since backward seeks are done. 55 56Other options are: 57 58-v Shows some information about the flic file being played. 59 60-? Shows a bit of help. 61 62Flc files: 63Flc files with resolutions higher than 320x200 are now supported, out of the 643 files I could find, 2 work OK, 1 works almost OK. 65There are some considerations to be made when playing big flic files. If the 66file fits completely into memory, there are no problems. However when memory 67is short Linux swaps pages out of memory, which can happen while a frame is 68being decoded. This is not only slow but also results in very ugly 69animation. Animation improves when option -a is used, in which case there 70will be much less swapping (there still is a lot of disk/buffer-cache access 71going on though). Using option -b is also advisable since the animation 72won't be smooth anyway. 73 74 75Bugs: 76- X and Y offsets are not handled. 77- Flic files with resolutions smaller (or bigger) than the screen size are 78 probably not handled correctly, but I have yet to see one. 79- At least one of the flc files I have displays a few pixels of trash in a 80 place where they should definately not be. This could be caused by 81 incorrect handling of a page break. When I feel motivated enough I'll try 82 and fix it. 83 84 85Release history: 86 87V0.3a Added support for FLC files with resolutions greater than 320x200. 88 (A real pain) 89 90V0.2a Added decoding of DELTA_FLC chunks, so some flc files can also be 91 played. Changed the command line parameters. Removed some small 92 bugs. 93 94V0.1 First release, only just capable of playing fli files. 95 96 97John Remyn (author) (boogyman@xs4all.hacktic.nl may work soon) 98Harm Hanemaayer hhanemaa@cs.ruu.nl (for mail) 99