Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news
From: "Nick Slaven" <NickSlaven@compuserve.com>
Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.programming.2d_graphics
Subject: Re: Static backgrounds
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1998 13:43:14 +0100
Organization: PlayStation Net Yaroze (SCEE)
Lines: 60
Message-ID: <6rubjt$pdo4@chuka.playstation.co.uk>
References: <35e075a6.464643@news.playstation.co.uk> <35E09A8E.AD6@manc.u-net.com>
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James Shaughnessy wrote in message <35E09A8E.AD6@manc.u-net.com>...
>I guess your asking for displaying the ny_title.tim screen for
>ECTS/famegame demos? -- I used loadimage orginally but now I'm
>really stuck for memory in Grav so I had to squash it down to 8bit
>and use sprites instead.  If you have loads of mem spare I'd use
>16bit and LoadImage, mainly as the picture will look much better.


The way I see it, you only need the title screen for 5 seconds right
at the begining of the game, I doubt if you will ever display it again
within the game. So why not get siocons to download the file, transfer
it to video mem, then at program startup use MoveImage to copy
it to the display video page before you load all the other tims from ram.
Wait for 5 seconds or a keypress, then when the game proper fires
up it will overwrite the title screen tim with other tims saving ram and
vram.
If memory is still a problem, then load the tims after your program in
memory space, & use malloc to reclaim the area (the heap is
defined as program end to stack start) ie malloc the OT rather than
statically defining it.

this is how i'm going to do it

in auto
local dload ny_title.tim 80090000
var -s320,0,640,511  -a80090000
local dload other.tim 80090000
....
etc.

in main.c

set up display etc

RECT    R={0,320,640,256},T=0;
VSync(0);
MoveImage(&R,0,0);
while((PadStatus!=PADRdown)&&(T<250))
    {
    GetPadStatus();
    T++;
    VSync(0);
    }
Set up game proper ...
load other tims from memory (heap space) into vram
call the heap initialisation routine (codewarrior supplies a code snippet
for doing this)
then malloc all the stuff you need
etc.

hope this helps

cheers

Nick S