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FADE CALCULATOR - a tool to precalculate palettes for fading effcets

(c) 2004 by Simon Sunnyboy / Paradize   http://paradize.atari.org/

What is FADE CALCULATOR?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

FADE CALCULATOR is a small tool that frees you from the need to write
complicated code when you want to fade a picture in or out.
With this tool you can precalculate the fade effect and simply play it
back by reading whole palettes from a table.
Resulting fades always consist of 16 fade steps using STE colors.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Atari STFM/STE/TT/Falcon with at least 512K of RAM 
color display
some sort of mass storage
pics you want to fade

Just doubleclick on FADECALC.PRG to run it.
The program will tell you when you're short on available RAM.
As the tool doesn't need much more then 150K this shouldn't happen though.

The menu should be self explanatory so I won't tell you how to operate it.

MODUS OPERANDI
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

FADE CALCULATOR works very simple. The first step is to load a picture into
memory. The fade effect will be calculated for the palette of this picture.
You can display a loaded picture always without fade effect to make sure
that it has been loaded properly.
Select a fade to calculate. The screen will turn red while the program
is calculating the various fade palettes.
You can now view the effect and select a rate that will be used to display
the effect.
If you're satisfied, save the calculated fade in the format you prefer.

The third option to select a special color to fade to, allows you to select
a specific color. All colors of the picture will be faded to this one then.
Why fade to black if you can fade to a dark blue too?
This option makes sure that you enter STFM colors exclusivly if using an
STFM machine.  

STFM vs STE
~~~~~~~~~~~

Thanks to the Atari designers, the STE palette is compatible to the STFM one.
FADE CALCULATOR will always calculate an STE fading effect regardless of the
machine used. However the resulting fade palette is fully compatible with
STFM machines. The resulting effect may look a lot smoother on STEs though.
This effect is a natural result of the larger palette of the STE.

DATA FORMATS
~~~~~~~~~~~~

This tool outputs a calculated fade in 3 different formats:

a) the most easiest one: a binary dump of all 16 palettes
   all 16 palettes of 32 bytes length are stored one after another
   in binary, resulting in a block of 512 bytes of data
b) assembler source: all 16 palettes are saved as dc.w statements
c) GFABASIC source: all 16 palettes are saved as DATA statements

Note that the last option is not needed in newer GFABASIC versions.
Use the binary option there and store the palettes in an INLINE.

EXAMPLE SOURCE
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Example sources on howto use the resulting fade data is included for
Assembler and GFABASIC.


That's it for now..i hope you enjoy using this little tool!


Stay Atari!

