What are the best (if any) options for fullscreen video playback on a bare bones Plus/Classic? Ideally I'd like to take some existing short mpeg files and convert them to play on the Plus/Classic... assuming this is even possible, what kind of frame-rate would be possible?
Video playback on Plus/Classic
My first reaction was to laugh. I mean the first requirement is to dither your video source down to 1-bit color. But there may be some application. I seem to recall some animation software that could be used to create full motion movies, possibly 15fps? If so, theoretically you could export your video to the same format. But, I seem to recall true video playback required a 68030. I'll look up available software later ...
As Mac128 said, it might be possible if you use some kind of animation software or whatever, but you can forget about anything that uses QuickTime - even QuickTime 1 requires a 68020.
No problem, just by-pass the Macintosh motherboard and use the B/W monitor using the analog signals directly.
You can forget mpeg or anything else that requires decompression on the fly. Uncompressed 1 bit 512x384 stills shouldn't take too much space - just store them as a sequence of images in a folder, run a slideshow type program and ramp up the refresh rate. At 3 or 4 frames per second you would approach anime quality
So I've come up with some animation software from the Plus era. It's called Hayden VideoWorks and seemed to have been pretty popular and well reviewed. There were several others as well, all of which seemed to be based around MacPaint. In which case you should be able to create individual frame outputs which would be compatible with this software. It did not discuss a frame rate, but interestingly restricted a 512K Mac to only about 2,000 frames with 24 animated objects on screen at once. So figure a Mac Plus would be 4x that or 8,000 frames, or at 15fps, about 8 min.
The Classic era has some software called Macromedia FilmWorks. However, I cannot find anything that has system requirements, so it may have required a 68020 minimum. Even then the same source discusses that QuickTime may have trouble managing 15fps and drop frames. So I would guess, a 68000 would play even fewer fps. Not the best for video.
That's about it. Prior to the Power PC, there does not appear to have been much in the way of video playback software for the Mac aside from Quicktime.
There is also of course Hypercard, though I'm not sure if it produces animation per se.
You definitely have your work cut out for you here. Not sure the exact application here, but you might consider starting with an SE/30 or Classic II, which will run QT and produce 1-bit video graphics. From there you can use QT to export dithered and reduced frame sequences, which you may be able to import in to the afore mentioned vintage software.
The Classic era has some software called Macromedia FilmWorks. However, I cannot find anything that has system requirements, so it may have required a 68020 minimum. Even then the same source discusses that QuickTime may have trouble managing 15fps and drop frames. So I would guess, a 68000 would play even fewer fps. Not the best for video.
That's about it. Prior to the Power PC, there does not appear to have been much in the way of video playback software for the Mac aside from Quicktime.
There is also of course Hypercard, though I'm not sure if it produces animation per se.
You definitely have your work cut out for you here. Not sure the exact application here, but you might consider starting with an SE/30 or Classic II, which will run QT and produce 1-bit video graphics. From there you can use QT to export dithered and reduced frame sequences, which you may be able to import in to the afore mentioned vintage software.
Not sure about it, but I definitely DO have a couple of DD floppies with a similar name on them lying in a box that came years ago with my 512Ke. I remember briefly trying that software on the said 512Ke. There was a System Disk with the app and some data disks. I didn't produce any content, but I remember an "iMove-like" workbench (is this an overstatement?
) in which you could arrange frames, and then having them playing back. I'll look it up, and I'll be more than happy to share if it sounds interesting to you!That sounds perfect...
Hey, that would be great!Not sure about it, but I definitely DO have a couple of DD floppies with a similar name on them lying in a box that came years ago with my 512Ke. I remember briefly trying that software on the said 512Ke. There was a System Disk with the app and some data disks. I didn't produce any content, but I remember an "iMove-like" workbench (is this an overstatement?
That's a good backup option.
And if you end up doing that, which I think you will have to, even with Quicktime due to the 1-bit dithering, you might want to use this to process each still frame to get the best image under 1-bit conditions. Time consuming, but I've never seen a video plug-in that converts to 1-bit where the video content was still decipherable and not just some random blocks of black & white.
http://www.tinrocket.com/software/hyperdither/
Now that's going to be *very* useful! Thanks for the tip.
I can't remember the name of it... but I remember seeing someone's home-brew video compression scheme for some type of 8-bit computer (can't remember if it was the Apple II, C64, etc). Might be worth looking in to, if you can track it down. I'll see if I can dig up a link to it...
There's 8088 Corruption, a guy got full screen, full motion video working on an original IBM PC, with the 4.77 Mhz 8088.
AHA! That's the one! Cheers [
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I found the floppy I was thinking of. The app is called MacroMind VideoWorks II. A liitle googling pointed me to MacroMind Wikipedia page, where I learned that that MacroMind later became Macromedia. VideoWorks is the first name of what later became Macromedia Director, now Adobe Director.
PM sent to luddite.
PM sent to luddite.
Interesting, they do not credit either VideoWorls or MusicWorks to Hayden, which I thought was another defunct company from the early Mac days. Who knew it turned out to be Macromedia. Thanks for that! EDIT: Ah! I get it ... just looked at an ad and see Hayden was the distributor, it says right on the box developed by Macromind!
I would love to have a look at that software.
ALSO: Based on a French review of the software from a 1985 MacExpo I found, it appears that VIdeo works could playback from 3 to 60 frames per second, which seems miraculous for a 512K.
That "8088 Corruption" hack is pretty impressive, indeed! I admire the twisted mind(s) that conceived of, and executed, its development.
Given that it evidently uses a VQ-based codec, I'm curious whether Quicktime (say, version 2 or thereabouts) and Cinepak could produce similar results on a Plus/Classic. The minimum system I've ever tried is an unmodified PB140, which produced better-looking video than I'd expected. I'd be interested in hearing from those of you who have tried Cinepak on less-capable machines.
Given that it evidently uses a VQ-based codec, I'm curious whether Quicktime (say, version 2 or thereabouts) and Cinepak could produce similar results on a Plus/Classic. The minimum system I've ever tried is an unmodified PB140, which produced better-looking video than I'd expected. I'd be interested in hearing from those of you who have tried Cinepak on less-capable machines.
Given that the 140 meets the 68030 minimums for QT, I am still somewhat surprised it produced good video at all at 1-bit resolution. The limitations of the 8088 video are obvious: while full screen, full motion, the resulting video is little more than blobs of color vaguely resembling the things it attempts to depict. Trying to imagine it in B&W reduces it to little more than stick-figure animation to be useful. Nevertheless, impressive on a Mac Plus.
I'm tempted to just stick an SE/30 in there, modified with a grayscale card and lie. ;-)
A decent solution may be to use the SlideShow program from Kid Pix. You'll need either Kid Pix 2 or Kid Pix Companion. I'm not sure if the program itself can run on a 1MB machine so your best bet is to produce the slide show on a compact with more RAM or on a Mac using a 12" monitor (the kind that was bundled with most early LCs), as it produces slide shows with the same resolution as the compact screen. Make sure you edit the pictures so that they are in monochrome. (If you've got color images you can always dither them using a more powerful graphics program before pasting them into Kid Pix; SlideShow generally prefers Kid Pix format since the size is right although you could use any program capable of saving the same size in PICT format if you really want to). Set the time slider to the lowest setting. Save your file as a stand alone slide show. This creates an application that can be opened on any computer and played. It's not QuickTime quality but for a 1MB compact Mac it looks pretty good. You can even add sound and transitions with this program.
Stick with the older floppy-based Kid Pix programs. Kid Pix Studio (the CD release) and newer need a 640 x 480 screen to run so I'd assume the slide shows they create would also need that minimum requirement. Keep in mind that the standard Kid Pix package does not include this program; you'll need the Companion add-on or Kid Pix 2 (which bundled Kid Pix and the Companion in one package as a solution for users of of computers that couldn't run Studio; it especially seemed to go over well with schools who had labs full of 12" monitors). Neither are all that common on eBay but now and then they do show up.
Stick with the older floppy-based Kid Pix programs. Kid Pix Studio (the CD release) and newer need a 640 x 480 screen to run so I'd assume the slide shows they create would also need that minimum requirement. Keep in mind that the standard Kid Pix package does not include this program; you'll need the Companion add-on or Kid Pix 2 (which bundled Kid Pix and the Companion in one package as a solution for users of of computers that couldn't run Studio; it especially seemed to go over well with schools who had labs full of 12" monitors). Neither are all that common on eBay but now and then they do show up.
Here's an interesting blurb from an Apple Developer's Tech Note: QUICKTIME 1.0: “YOUOUGHTA BEIN PICTURES” d e v e l o p Summer 1991
Could it have been the QuikTime Interactive component of 3.0?
Sooooooo ... which version of QT added 68000 support? Or was this yet another unfulfilled promise of Apple's, when they realized there was no point?
Could it have been the QuikTime Interactive component of 3.0?
It was in the Copeland/68000 Classic release.
QT 1.5 was the first to support Cinepak, I believe, but I'm not sure if I have it. I definitely have 2 and above, so I will just have to fire up my old Plus and see if anything useful happens.
Under 18s: please move on.
Mike Saenz wrote the ever entertaining MacPlayMate and Wikipedia associates him with authorship of Comic Works. My twenty year old recollection of MacPlayMate is that if you double-clicked a data file, it would open in an animation package if it was installed. My memory fails to recall the name of the software package. If MacPlayMate is simply a runtime engine for Comic Works or Video Works or whatever, there's an opportunity for fun.
Mike Saenz wrote the ever entertaining MacPlayMate and Wikipedia associates him with authorship of Comic Works. My twenty year old recollection of MacPlayMate is that if you double-clicked a data file, it would open in an animation package if it was installed. My memory fails to recall the name of the software package. If MacPlayMate is simply a runtime engine for Comic Works or Video Works or whatever, there's an opportunity for fun.
It is, for VideoWorks. And it is fun…
Actually I apologize for not getting immediately back to those who asked for my VideoWorks floppy. Lot of work, not enough time to spend in the vintage Mac world. PMs will be sent in the next couple of minutes. But on said floppy were two "examples" files, that I opened in VideoWorks, only to see they were the animations used in MacPlaymate. Sweet memories. Now, I made an image of the floppy that doesn't contain those files…
:?:
The original 128 and 512 could do very little animation because of the lack of memory. About the only option was MacroMind's VideoWorks, which allowed animating a small software sprite (like a walking dog) over a MacPaint background drawing. With 400K disks, there wasn't room to store digitized video. With a RAM upgrade to 1MB or more and an 800K floppy, short full screen animations were possible, such as these:
http://web.me.com/henryspragens/stuff/Mac_Movies/Mac_Movies.html
Using some demon tweaked assembly code, a full frame could be decompressed in 1/30 second. You can't play anything compressed with a modern codec on anything without 32-bit color quickdraw, which means a 68030 or better. Going back even earlier, there were movies made on Apple][s though frame rates were 5-10 FPS in lo-res, and 2 or 3 FPS in hi-res. To see the best animation a system is capable of, play a game on it. Games have always pushed the limits of hardware to the max.
http://web.me.com/henryspragens/stuff/Mac_Movies/Mac_Movies.html
Using some demon tweaked assembly code, a full frame could be decompressed in 1/30 second. You can't play anything compressed with a modern codec on anything without 32-bit color quickdraw, which means a 68030 or better. Going back even earlier, there were movies made on Apple][s though frame rates were 5-10 FPS in lo-res, and 2 or 3 FPS in hi-res. To see the best animation a system is capable of, play a game on it. Games have always pushed the limits of hardware to the max.
Okay, whoever was laughing at the start of this thread needs to see these clips... really quite remarkable!
The Apple II music is awesome too!
The Apple II music is awesome too!
Henry! It's good to see you found your way here. You probably don't remember me (Jeff Walther) though. We met at the Goodwill Computer Store here in Austin, several years ago, back when it was still near Ohlen. I've been holding onto your card for the day when I would need to ask you about that undocumented hook in the original Mac/Mac Plus ROM which lets you add additional code at a higher address--I think. It's been several years; I may remember it wrong.