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Wow - that SpongeBob must have taken quite a bit of time to assemble! Shame I cannot run it on a real machine - 320KB is my largest.

 

Stephen Anderson

 

Hello Stephen,

thanks for the kind words. Yes, the Spongebob intro was a real pain to convert. But since I have seen the MyIDE version which uses RGB screens with extremely high flicker, I wanted to show that something similar is possible on the A8 without harddisk and with less flicker... alas, the tip animation now requires 576k RAM, I could not get it much shorter without skipping more frames or using an even lower screen size (and err, 80x50 pixels is already very small)...

 

The ani was done with tip animator version 2xb (since version 2.8 would have produced high flicker) and the ~160 frames was the max. I could use with that version. It took me two or three weeks to get the tip ani done and the heaviest problem was not converting to tip but reducing the number of frames more and more until the tip ani worked...

 

greetings, Andreas Koch.

 

P.S.: I have approx. 30 other tv intros waiting to be converted into a tip ani, all from tv series which I watched as a child, e.g. Sindbad, Pinocchio, Bee Maya, Captain Future, Barbapapa, etc. - not sure if and when I find the time to do it...

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P.S.: I have approx. 30 other tv intros waiting to be converted into a tip ani, all from tv series which I watched as a child, e.g. Sindbad, Pinocchio, Bee Maya, Captain Future, Barbapapa, etc. - not sure if and when I find the time to do it...

From this list, I vote for Barbapapa and Maya the Bee!

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Well Rybags,

I am not quite sure what you mean, so here is a short overview of how to create tip animations:

 

1) download a GIF/FLI/FLC/TIF/... ani or a MPG/MOV/AVI/FLV/... movie from the internet (ripping, ripping,ripping...)

 

2a) if its an ani then extract all the frames from it (I use Irfan View for that) or convert it into AVI format (e.g. with Super)...

2b) if its a movie, convert it to a "standard" format and then extract all frames from it (I use eright-soft`s Super for that, since Irfan View will only extract frames from AVI movies; it can play a lot of other movie formats, but it will not extract any frames then; Irfan View can extract GIF anis easily, but it cannot display or extract FLI/FLC anis, unless they have been converted to AVI)...

 

3) the frames should now be in JPG, BMP or PNG format (not GIF!), so you can use TipConv 1.0.0 by Epi to convert one frame after another (alas, this Tipconv. does not allow multiple/batch conversions, so if there are 160 frames, you have to convert them one after another by hand)... you can select between various settings and options, like palette, saturation and brightness (and sometimes changing one of these settings will give a completely different result)...

 

4) NOTE: Allthough TIP and Tipconv. allow 160x119 pixels resolution, the tip animator only uses/displays 160x100 pixels, so better downsize the JPG, BMP, PNG frames to 160x100 pixels or smaller (I use XnView for that); to have an even smaller screen, one can downsize the frames even further (say 80x50 or whatever size you want) - but then one should add a black border around the frames, so that the frames plus borders do have the standard size of 160x100 again... (this can be done in XnView too)...

 

5) when all frames have been converted into TIP format, one can use the tip animator 2.8 or tip animator 2xb to create the tip animation (therefore, I start the WIN XP DOS/Input prompt/Commandline, go to the relevant subdir and start the tip animator)...

 

Well, thats it in short. Of course I am playing around with the frames or the tip animations quite often, when the result is not as good as I wish. Besides changing the options in tipconv. and watching the different results in the tip ani, I also change the size often (fullscreen 160x100, smaller screen 120x80, small screen 80x50 or other resolutions, like 100x100, 80x80, etc.), convert to greyscale (if the colors are bad on the A8; but when using greyscale, I always have to darken the frames) or if everything fails, I re-paint some part of the frames (sky, water, grass, or just the top or bottom of the frames; most of the time I use GIMP for that, but I also have other PAINTing programs)...

 

On my wishlist for faster or better tip animation creation would be:

- a PC packer program that makes the 128k-1088k animations shorter (shorter loading time + less disk space on the real A8), since packing the big animations on the A8 takes many hours...

- a PC program to display/correct/paint TIP pics directly on the PC

- an update of Tipconv. that allows for multiple/batch conversions of JPG/BMP/PNG frames to TIP

(e.g. set all the options you want, then highlight 50 frames and convert them in *one go* into TIP format)

 

If you need any other info, let me know. Attached tip animator (both version 2.8 and version 2xB) and tip converter... greetings, Andreas Koch.

 

P.S.: Since I am using a WIN XP based PC, I noted only PC programs for WIN XP here; some of them are also available for MAC or Linux, but not all of them I guess, sorry...

Edited by CharlieChaplin
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Well,

just two more tip animations:

 

- fourier: a) one with 80x80 pixels resolution which requires 320k RAM and is quite slow, b) another one with 60x60 pixels resolution that requires 128k RAM and is a little faster... (the original GIF resolution was 70x70)...

 

- hypdod: originally named hyperbolic dodecahedron, looks like a windows screensaver to me, a) one with 100x100 pixels resolution that requires 320k RAM and b) one with 60x60 pixels resolution which requires 128k RAM... (original GIF resolution 70x70)...

 

-Andreas Koch.

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Well,

just two more tip animations:

 

- fourier: a) one with 80x80 pixels resolution which requires 320k RAM and is quite slow, b) another one with 60x60 pixels resolution that requires 128k RAM and is a little faster... (the original GIF resolution was 70x70)...

 

- hypdod: originally named hyperbolic dodecahedron, looks like a windows screensaver to me, a) one with 100x100 pixels resolution that requires 320k RAM and b) one with 60x60 pixels resolution which requires 128k RAM... (original GIF resolution 70x70)...

 

-Andreas Koch.

 

Nice stuff!

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So,

here it is, as requested: Barbapapa, the tv intro as an A8 tip animation...

 

- Barbapapa 576k: uses 148 frames, tip animator v2.8 (has some flicker, since v2xb did not work with so many frames!), version 1 has a delay of 9, version 2 has a delay of 12;

 

- Barbapapa 320k: uses 74 frames, tip animator 2xb, version 1 with delay 9, version 2 with delay 12.

 

All animations have a resolution of 80x50 pixels, there are some glitches here and there (most notably the strange stripe right under the animation), this is due to a bad video source. Think the video at youtube was uploaded / converted from an old (VHS-) video tape... -Andreas Koch.

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Well,

some more tip animations... re-created biomorph to work with 128k RAM, macarena to work with 64k RAM and also re-created raymove with greyscale, since the colors were so awful. Think all the rest are new creations... MSP is an abbreviation for metallic spider I guess, its a little pixelized, but I like it... -Andreas Koch.

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Well,

two new ones are here...

 

- Mandelbrot: from 100 frames I used 98 frames, 80x50 pixels with tip animator 2xb, thus it requires 320k RAM; used delay 7 which is fast enough I think - and for those that want to see every single frame I also created an ani with delay 12 (extremely slow)...

 

- Animray: the original GIF ani has 360 frames (have not seen a GIF ani with more frames yet); I created two versions, one with 90 frames (approx. 303 kbytes in length) and another one with 45 frames (approx. 155 kbytes in length); both versions use 80x50 pixels with tip animator 2xb and require 320k RAM minimum...

 

the Animray.Gif animation can be downloaded as a separate file (since it has a length of 1.8 megabytes, zipped still 1.7 megabytes)...

 

greetings, Andreas Koch.

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Well,

gave the "aircombat" ani another try - and since it is not really a combat, I named it "under fire" this time...

 

- under fire1 320k: uses 54 frames, 80x50 pixels, tip animator 2xb and has a length of approx. 138kbytes (tried to create a 128k version here, but failed)...

- under fire2 320k: uses 96 frames, 80x50 pixels, tip animator 2xb and has a length of approx 243 kbytes...

 

- under fire 576k: uses 91 frames, 120x80 pixels, tip animator 2.8 and has a length of approx. 438 kbytes (this one did not work with tip animator 2xb, so I had to use version 2.8 which has some flicker of course)...

 

- under fire avi: this is the "atari 8bit friendly" version of the aircombat movie; converted the 6MB WMV with 25 frames per sec. into a 1.7MB AVI with 12.5 frames per second. The AVI movie is the one I used for the tip animations by simply extracting the frames with Irfan View...

 

greetings, Andreas Koch.

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Well,

here are two small excerpts from the (german) Captain Future tv intro. Since colors were awfull (with all palettes of tip conv.), I used greyscales instead. The two animations are showing the spaceship comet (cut off from the intro), they use 80x50 pixels, 20 frames, tip animator 2xb and require a minimum of 128k RAM. Have also added the converted + shortened (6.25 frames/s) AVI, I used for the animation... -Andreas Koch.

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