Amos Professional Manual  Contents  Index

IFF Animation


Deluxe Paint users may need to slow down the speed of AMOS Professional animations by one fiftieth of a second, in order to harmonise the display, like this:

X> Wait Form Param+1

This has nothing to do with the Deluxe Paint package, but takes into account the extra efficiency of the AMOS Professional double buffering and copper calculations, when compared to the standard Workbench routines!

Iff Masking
AMOS Professional does not restrict you to loading all of an IFF picture file. It is possible to load specific parts of the file that hold such items as the palette and the bit-maps only. The PICTURE function is used in conjunction with the MASK IFF function to achieve this.

PICTURE
function: return mask details of an IFF image
mask=Picture

MASK IFF
instruction: mask IFF picture data
Mask Iff bit-map

The PICTURE function returns the precise format of the mask used by a picture, and it is used like this:

X> Mask Iff Picture
   Load Iff "Picture_Name"

Here are some typical settings that can be used to load masked data from an IFF file:

X> Mask Iff %100 : Rem Load palette of picture only
   Mask Iff %10000 : Rem Load bitmaps only

Freezing the display
In the next Chapter, the AMOS Professional animation language AMAL is explained. AMAL animations can be frozen with an AMAL FREEZE instruction, and unfrozen with AMAL ON. The following commands are equivalents to these two instructions, and also offer STOS compatibility.

FREEZE
instruction: freeze the display
Freeze

UNFREEZE
instruction: unfreeze the display
Unfreeze

Use these commands in your AMOS Professional programs to perform a simple freezing and unfreezing of moving displays.

Back    Next
07.05.07