FLI player is a Mac application to play MS-DOS files ending in the extension “.FLI”. FLI files are displayed as a sequence of “frames” each 320 pixels wide x 200 pixels high with each pixel 8 bits in depth (256 colors) which are played in a continuous loop. The result is a short animated movie. FLI player requires Color Quickdraw and a color monitor.
This command will open a file of the selected type using the standard file open dialog. The type of file selected may be changed using the “Options…” menu command.
• Close [cmd-K]
This command will close the FLI file without closing the application.
• Help [cmd-H]
This command will display this help window.
• Options…
This command will display a dialog box which enables the changing of certain parameters. The parameters which may be changed using this dialog are kept in the application’s resource file and so are “remembered” on reopening the application. Files of type ‘pFLI’ and ‘pBIN’ are initially set to be selected in the “Open…” menu. Files of type ‘pFLI’ are FLI files which have been saved with the “change creator and type” option set in this dialog. Files of type ‘pBIN’ are binary files extracted from MS-DOS “.ZIP” files using the application UnZip.
If the “change file type and creator” option is set, a file which is recognized as a FLI file by the application will change the file type to ‘pFLI’ and the creator to ‘πFLI’ which will then display the FLI file with a special icon and enable the FLI file to be opened by FLI player by double-clicking it.
• Quit [cmd-Q]
This command will close the current FLI file, if any, and exit the application.
None of the commands under this menu item are active until a FLI file has been opened and the first frame has been displayed on the screen.
• Play [cmd-P]
This command will “play” the FLI file continuously without interruption. ONLY THE FOLLOWING KEY PRESSES ARE RECOGNIZED:
cmd-P
cmd-B
cmd-.
+
-
NO OTHER COMMANDS OR MENU ITEMS ARE ACTIVE WHEN THE FLI FILE IS BEING PLAYED.
Cmd-P will terminate the playing of the FLI file at the end of the frame currently being processed, and will stop with that frame displayed and the frame number displayed in the message window.
Cmd-B will terminate the playing of the FLI file at frame number 1.
Cmd-. will terminate the playing of the current FLI file and hide both the FLI window and the message window, but the FLI file is not closed.
In addition, during the playing of a FLI file, either the “+” key or the “-” key may be pressed. The “+” key will increment the interframe speed by 1 tick (1/60 of a second), thus slowing down the animation speed. The “-” key will decrement the interframe speed by 1 tick thus speeding up the animation speed. See the discussion under menu item “Frame Speed…”.
• Next Frame [cmd-N]
This command will display the next frame of the FLI file and update the message window.
• Hide Window/Show Window [cmd-W]
This command will hide the FLI window and the message window if present, or show the FLI window and the message window if hidden.
• Frame Speed… [cmd-I]
This command will display a dialog which enables the setting of the number of ticks (1/60 of a second) between frames. The number of ticks between frames is dependent upon the processing time for the frame. If “F” is the frame speed, and “P” is the time required to process the particular frame, then a delay of minimun[0;(F - P)] ticks is inserted between the last displayed frame and the next frame. However, if F is less than P, then the frame speed will not change as the delay would be 0 ticks. This is often the case with “complicated” frames, that is, the time to process the frame may be longer than the frame speed requested so that lowering the frame speed (or pressing “-” while the FLI is playing) will seem to have no effect.
• Colors… [cmd-M]
This command will display a rather complicated looking dialog which enables the manipulation of the colors of the image being displayed. Contrast, brightness, color and tint may be changed in a manner similar to a color television. A FLI file may change its color table “on the fly” so to speak. The effect of changing the original colors of the FLI display is to insert a mathematical “color filter” between the FLI frame processing and the display of the frame. For this reason, the animation may be slowed down if the frame images are complex.
• Revert [cmd-R]
This command will revert the color table of the FLI file to its original state, cancelling all color manipulations made using the “Colors…” menu item.
A FLI file consists of a 128 byte header followed by a sequence of frames. Each frame consists of a frame header and zero or more “chunks”. There are five types of chunks:
FLI_COLOR this chunk type consists of a compressed color table for the current frame and all followinmg frames until a new FLI_COLOR chunk is encountered.
FLI_LC this chunk type consists of a “line-compressed” image containing the changes between the last frame and the current frame.
FLI_BLACK this chunk type is an instruction to make the screen black.
FLI_BRUN this chunk type consists of a “line-compressed” image for all 200 lines of the frame.
FLI_COPY this chunk type consists of 64,000 bytes of uncompressed data constituting a 320x200 image.
If during processing a corrupt chunk is encountered, an error message to this effect is displayed.
