AWeb PowerPC GIF Plugin | |
| Top | Amiga | Aweb | Contact |
Yvon Rozijn kindly sent me the source for his 68k gif decoder. I have ported it to vbcc and have built a WarpOS version. This would not have been possible without Yvon's source.
I must also thank Frank Wille for work on vlink and vbcc and the help he gave me with vbcc and WarpOS libraries. Also thanks to Volker Barthelmann for his efforts writing and maintaining vbcc itself.
Currently this software should be considered ALPHA. While it does work here, I take no responsibility for it's actions. It appears to be running quite well now, but it may or may not crash your machine. I would be very interested in others experiances with this plugin.
Isn't as good as I would like. It is quite a bit faster than the 68k plugin on my 040/25 603e/175, but it takes quite a long time to initialise. The result is that you see nothing for quite a while, and then all the images start decoding fairly quickly. There are a number of things that can be done about this, and you may see significant improvments in a future version. To get the full benefit of this decoder you need to set the PROGRESS variable fairly high. A setting of 40 seems to work well for me.
Please mail me and tell me of your experiance with the plugin. I'm particularly interested in comments about the plugin's stability and performance.
| v0.1 (21/07/01) | First version, not very fast, not very stable :-( |
| v0.2 (19/01/02) | Fixed stability problems, still not very fast |
| v0.3 (06/04/02) | Signficant Speedup |
To install this plugin please first install the 68k version of the gif decoder. You will find this on the Aweb homepage. Now copy the PPC plugins to your plugin directory (usually AWeb3:AWebPlugin). Finally, edit your Browser Settings and click the Viewers tab. Select the gif plugin and choose your favourite PPC decoder instead of the 68k plugin. The arguments for the PPC plugin are the same as those for the 68k plugin, however the speed is quite dependant on the value of the PROGRESS variable, it should be set quite high. I use a value of 40.
If you have problems with the installation, be sure that you have got the filenames correct. Do not change the names of the plugins, as AWeb will silently ignore them if the filenames are incorrect. If you have trouble, then use the debug version of the plugin and install a serial terminal or something like sashimi (from aminet). You should recieve some debug output. This will be useful for pinpointing where things go wrong. If you get no output at all, then it is likely that AWeb isn't loading the plugin for some reason.
copyright 2002 Tom Parker - last modified 6 Apr 2002