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Re: Nice Hires screens

Posted: Fri Apr 14, 2017 7:13 am
by Dbug
My idea is more like something where you read a bunch of data as fast as you can, in a temporary buffer, then run some code that do something with the data, then continue loading.

Obviously that means that the tape contains blank sections, which have to be at least as long as it take to process the data :)

Since it's an animation, a possible encoding could be to just store a simplified delta from one frame to the other, or to do it in text mode and have something such as for example redefining some characters, or changing some characters on the screen.

Re: Nice Hires screens

Posted: Fri Apr 14, 2017 6:38 pm
by Symoon
Dbug wrote: Fri Apr 14, 2017 7:13 am My idea is more like something where you read a bunch of data as fast as you can, in a temporary buffer, then run some code that do something with the data, then continue loading.

Obviously that means that the tape contains blank sections, which have to be at least as long as it take to process the data :)
Sure, but the problem I see is that animation / music would have to stop while the next part of data is loading, since fastest loading is taking all the cycles ;)

Re: Nice Hires screens

Posted: Fri Apr 14, 2017 8:04 pm
by Dbug
Sure, but in my idea we would load only few dozens of bytes for each frame.
Have you computed the average bit rate you get in fast loading mode?

Re: Nice Hires screens

Posted: Fri Apr 14, 2017 9:14 pm
by Symoon
Well it seems the most complex Hires screens (thus unefficient compression) take less than 5 seconds to load. If you plan to load small quantites of data, I prefer to rely on the worst case.
8KB in 5 seconds, that's about 1,5KB per second (of useful information, neglecting start / stop bits) (I removed the parity, no time to check it and less information to load).

That's of course assuming you keep the special loader in memory constantly.

EDIT: and just in case, an empty screen (maximum compression) loads in 0.8 second