aaflip -- an ascii arted flic player for aalib Version 0.3 This is modifies version of flip(flic animation file player, see bellow) that works in text mode. ORIGINAL FLIP README ==================== flip -- a flic file player for the Linux console Version 0.3 By John Remyn This is a non-X flic animation file player for Linux. A VGA compatible card is required. Flic files can usually be recognized by the .fli or .flc extensions at the end of their filenames. Fli files are limited to a resolution of 320x200, while flc files can have any resolution. The binary requires svgalib to be installed (svgalib can be found at sunsite.unc.edu: /pub/Linux/libs). The default method of playing is to load the first frame of the animation sequence and display it. After this the remainder of the flic file is loaded into memory, and the animation starts. The animation ends when q or ctrl-c is pressed. There are some flags that control the way the flic file is handled: -a Remove frames from memory after processing. Using this option leaves more memory for other processes, but relies on the buffer cache for continuous animation. -b Process frames immediately as they are loaded. When using this option the animation frames are shown as soon as the player has read them, so you don't have to wait until the entire file has been read. The disadvantage is that the animation becomes jumpy if the speed set by the animation is higher than the speed of loading. -c Keep the screen black while loading the animation. This conflicts with option b, which can give interesting results. -f This removes the clock synchronization. This is just for fun, so you can show off the speed of your computer :-) -n Play the flic file times. -s Sets the delay between frames to *0.01 seconds. Option -s 0 is the same as -f. - Causes flip to read the flic file from stdin. Using this with option -a may cause trouble since backward seeks are done. Other options are: -v Shows some information about the flic file being played. -? Shows a bit of help. Flc files: Flc files with resolutions higher than 320x200 are now supported, out of the 3 files I could find, 2 work OK, 1 works almost OK. There are some considerations to be made when playing big flic files. If the file fits completely into memory, there are no problems. However when memory is short Linux swaps pages out of memory, which can happen while a frame is being decoded. This is not only slow but also results in very ugly animation. Animation improves when option -a is used, in which case there will be much less swapping (there still is a lot of disk/buffer-cache access going on though). Using option -b is also advisable since the animation won't be smooth anyway. Bugs: - X and Y offsets are not handled. - Flic files with resolutions smaller (or bigger) than the screen size are probably not handled correctly, but I have yet to see one. - At least one of the flc files I have displays a few pixels of trash in a place where they should definately not be. This could be caused by incorrect handling of a page break. When I feel motivated enough I'll try and fix it. Release history: V0.3a Added support for FLC files with resolutions greater than 320x200. (A real pain) V0.2a Added decoding of DELTA_FLC chunks, so some flc files can also be played. Changed the command line parameters. Removed some small bugs. V0.1 First release, only just capable of playing fli files. John Remyn (author) (boogyman@xs4all.hacktic.nl may work soon) Harm Hanemaayer hhanemaa@cs.ruu.nl (for mail)