Short: BREAK the 256-colour barrier in a GIF! Author: Chris Covell (ccovell@direct.ca) Uploader: Chris Covell Type: pix/illu Requires: IBrowse or Netscape (GFX card recommended) Architecture: generic I just came up with a clever way to show hundreds, or even thousands of colours in a single GIF image! It's little tricky, but it can be done! Why would you want to do this in a GIF image when you already have JPEGs to show 24-bit images? Well, JPEGs are good, and they're small. But they're lossy, and you can't do transparency with them. If JPEGs had an alpha-channel for the Internet, then I'd be in love with them. But they don't. So, I came up with this method whereby you can make a GIF animation that has an individual palette for each frame. Each frame is a separate part of a complete picture. When viewed in Netscape or IBrowse, the entire image is shown and so you can have a GIF with thousands of colours if you want, and A TRANSPARENT BACKGROUND! To make it work, you first have to take your original image, and cut it up into several different pieces as you like. Then, load each piece into a bitmap paint program, like DPaint or PPaint, etc. Re-map the 24-bit pieces one-by-one into 256 colours. Place a piece in the position where it was originally in the entire image, and make sure you have a background colour for transparency. But be sure to only have one piece on the screen at one time. Save the image for the very first frame (usually the top leftmost one) AS LARGE AS THE ORIGINAL PICTURE WAS. Make sure the blank portions of the screen are the background (transparent) colour. All subsequent pieces of the image can be picked up as brushes from the top leftmost corner of the image to the lower extremities of the piece that you've just laid down. But always make sure that the background is transparent! After picking up a brush, save it as a GIF (or convert it to a GIF later. Make sure that the colour that is transparent is the same colour across all images. (I make it colour 0 just for simplicity's sake.) Next, use WhirlGIF (available on AmiNet) to make the GIF animation. You need to specify the disposal method as "not" or "none"; the transparency, as colour 0 (or whatever colour is transparent in your frames); and don't make the GIF animation loop; it must stop at the last frame. Here is an example of the command line: Whirlgif -v -o Ram:My.GIF -time 0 -disp not -trans 0 frame1.gif frame2.gif.. After it correctly makes the GIF, you should load it up only in IBrowse or Netscape. Browsers such as AWeb, Voyager, or Internet Explorer don't show the images properly. I also haven't found any image viewers which show them properly either. But my main purpose for these special GIFs is for use on the Web, anyway. It just goes to show how correctly IBrowse and Netscape display pages on the WWW, eh? Included in this archive are some example images for you to check out. Load up the TryMe.HTML page into IBrowse or Netscape. It will show you the differences between a JPG, a 256-colour GIF, and my special hacked GIF of the same image. I've also included a hacked GIF of my logo, which shows off the ability to have thousands of colours and a transparent background! Other things of mine which you should check out are: pix/anim/AmiBanner.lha ;An animating GIF banner that supports Amiga. pix/boot/Win95BURN.lha ;My Windows'95 trasher. Burn, baby burn!!! pix/boot/Win95BURN.jpg ;A JPEG version of that pic. pix/boot/WinBURN24.lha ;A 24-bit IFF version of that pic. pix/wb/BeBoxWBs.lha ;Some pics of my WB using the BeIcons. pix/wb/JapanWB.lha ;A Japanese Workbench. ;-) pix/wb/HAMBrowse.lha ;A Pic showing how to browse the WWW in HAM! pix/icon/BeIcons_2.lha ;A set of NewIcons in the BeOS style! (and more!) gfx/aga/HUGEBench.lha ;Some monitor settings for a HUGE Workbench! misc/emu/Snd2Mid.lha ;Converts iNES SNDs to MIDI. And of course, my webpage at http://www.sfu.ca/~ccovell/ It has lots of stuff that you might enjoy exploring. See ya!