GG 1.00 VGA/SuperVGA GIF viewer - GoodGirl Version 1.00 (June 92) By Van Dao MAI from the land Down Under Wollongong AUSTRALIA In this software I used the GIF library by Gershon Elber (GIFLIB 1.1) for GIF decoding. The BGI drivers are created by Jordan Hargrave for SuperVGA hardware in both 16 colours and 256 colours mode. The XMS driver is by James W. Birdsall (xmsif 1.4). I would like to acknowledge the excellent works of these people and their generosity to let the works used by the public. Any interested users can get the above softwares from the network. MAIN FEATURES ------------- - Handles VGA 16 grey levels or SuperVGA 256 colours in many resolutions from 320x200 to 1024x768 switchable by a key stroke. I decide not to use colours in 16 colours VGA mode because grey scales look best when only 16 levels are available. - Open up to 50 GIF files in one session and allocate many Megabytes of virtual storage for them. Maximum image size is set at 2000x2000. - Provide a rich set of commands activated by the key strokes. The commands are visible with online help. Here are some of them ... Help Invoked by F1 Pop up menu Type ENTER key SlideShow F2 Zoom (U)p or (D)own Scroll Use the arrow keys Mark (M)ark Delete Selected from pop up menu Select Selected from pop up menu Resolution 1, 2, 3 and 4 PostScript Selected from pop up menu ... User would be able to work it out from the help menu. - Easy to install, normally no configuration needed as all graphics drivers are included. Simply copy all the files into a directory that is on the search PATH - Automatically use CPU idle time to decode GIF files in background while you look. There is progress meter to show how a job is going. - No conditions are attached to the personal use of this program. However I would like users to support the efforts to protect the environment. USAGE ----- There is no manual written for this GIF viewer due to its simplicity. Here is a little note about things that are not quite visible to users. - Video card types supported: Ahead, ATI, Chips & Tech, Everex, Paradise, Trident, Tseng (both 3000 and 4000 chipsets), Oak, and Video7. - An environment variable called BGIDRIVER is checked by the program to see if there is an alternative BGI driver (Borland Graphics Driver). If this is found the program will use it instead of the default one. The format is DriverName.Mode where DriverName is the name of the file and Mode is the mode to be used at start up (usually between 0..5). Example: a DOS command like (In autoexec.bat) set BGIDRIVER=SVGA16.4 will set the variable to SVGA16.BGI and tell the program to use the graphics driver called SVGA16.BGI and mode 4 to start with. The file is supposed to be either in the current directory or where the command line option -d points to. EGAVGA.BGI normal VGA/EGA driver 16 grey levels SVGA16.BGI super VGA driver 16 grey levels SVGA256.BGI super VGA driver 256 colours (default) - OPTIONS at command line The command to run GG is GG [-d BGIDirectory ][-f BGIdriver.Mode ] [-m Mode] [-h] [-q] GifFiles There are several options at command line -d, -f, -m, -h and -q. They are all OPTIONAL. Here are the meaning of them -q Tells GG to be quiet, when it exits no messages will be printed except error messages. -h Displays help information how to use the program. -d DIR tells where the BGI driver is kept. "DIR" is the directory path name to the driver. -f Driver.Mode tells the name of the BGI driver and the mode to use. Similar to the environment variable BGIDRIVER mentioned above -m Mode tells the mdoe to start up with. This option should be used when the default BGI driver is assumed (no -d and/or-f). Again the mode is in the range 0..5 The 256 colours driver takes 0-4 and the 16 grey scales takes 0-5 - Expanded memory is what expected by the program. If found it will be used to store images and speed up the refreshing of screen. To configure for DOS (386 machines) put device=c:\dos\emm386.exe 512 ram into config.sys and reboot the system. You can change the 512 to whatever you want if you have more physical memory. When expanded memory runs out, the hard disk will be used. Therefore it is best to run the program on a large hard disk partition. If the machine crashes you have to remove the file swapfile.$$$ to get back the space. The program will create this file in your current directory. If you run the program again it will truncate the file and remove it later saving you from doing this yourself. XMS support is also available. I have only tried an XMS library for a short time, therefore I am not sure that this is work on all machines. In MSDOS 5.0 XMS is automatically loaded. There is no need to load emm386.exe fro expanded memory. If you run OS/2 V2.0 then run this program in a full screen OS/2 DOS emulation. It will not run under a windowed DOS emulation. Make sure that you configure DOS settings with plenty of XMS and/or EMS. - Output in postscript format for PostScript laser printer is supported. The output file will take the same name but the extension. The extension for PostScript output will be ".PS". The output will be in grey scales (colour is yet to be supported). - It supports three file selection/deletion commands. Mark, Delete and Select. These commands allow users to mark file(s), delete marked file(s) or rename them with a different extension name. The select command helps to isolate the good GIF files from the bad ones, and the delete command let the user delete unwanted file. In these commands, the image is still on the buffer until the user quit. Only the files on disk are promptly renamed or deleted. This is handy for selecting the good GIF files out of the lot you have just down loaded. LIMITATIONS ----------- It is designed to be compact therefore there are always limitations. It does not handle interlaced GIF. Apart from this it is fairly rich in features for its size. Van Dao MAI Wollongong University AUSTRALIA e-mail: v.mai@uow.edu.au Address: 50/7 Corrimal St. Wollongong N.S.W 2500 Australia Bye, from the land Down Under.