B-movie;)

Compressed animations on VMU!

How to create movies easily on PC?

1. Image creation

1.a. creating movies using Flash: Yeah, simply use Macromedia Flash to create a movie. This program supports you with very powerful motion and shape tweening functions. Of course it is not recommended to use other colors than black and white. Also, don't mind to use small text within such a Flash movie - the result will not match the quality you achieve by editing every pixel on your own. When you're finished, export the movie to a .bmp series. You can use the option smooth but decide for yourself what looks better on VM. Before compressing, check the movie for errors because the conversion to the low resolution is done automatically and may look better on the small display when modifying some pixels on certain single images.

1.b. creating single images: If just creating a single image like the introscreen or if you need control of every single pixel, draw your 48x32 pixel image with any arbitrary paint program and save it as .bmp file. Most programs support that solution.

2. Image conversion and compression: To convert these .bmp's to a textual form to insert into sourcecode you need bmp2asm. To save you from typing 500 commandlines for a 500 frames movie I made the tool makebat. Doubleclick makebat.exe and insert the needed filename data. The output of makebat is compatible to avi2bmp's output filenames and contains also a compression call at the end. Now be sure to have all your *.bmp's, bmp2asm and the B-movie;) encoding tool in the same directory as the created batch file. After creating the batch file just double-click that file and let it run till all frames are converted and finally compressed.

How to play back in your VMU game?

1. First insert the provided decompression code in your existing sourcecode.

2. For every movie you got, insert lines like:

movie3forw:

include"movie3.i"

movie3backw:

Make sure that your movie file is in the same directory as the sourcecode when compiling with vmuasm.

3. Whenever you want a image or movie displayed, write this:

mov#<movie3forw, trl

mov#>movie3forw, trh

clr1 dectype, backwards

call play

....and if playing backwards, insert:

mov#<movie3backw, trl

mov#>movie3backw, trh

set1 dectype, backwards

call play