Intro Maker 2.0 by The Humble Guys
--------------------------- THG Intro Maker V2.0 --------------------------
------------------------------ Coded by Sauron -----------------------------
Have you ever seen those great VGA loaders put out by THG? You ever thought
to yourself "I wish I could do something like that!" Well, now the time has
come. Two months in the making but it's finally here!
The THG Intro Maker V2.0!!!!
This program is very simple to use but if you don't follow directions, you
will either get a runtime error or a weird loader! I have not the time to
put in error checkers for this version of the intro maker. I haven't had
time to check all the possiblities of what diffferent values will
come up with so the best thing is to experiment.
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Things added in V2.0
- NO THG Beginning
- 2nd scroller (and changed the 1st scroller to a 8x16 font)
- Changeable fonts (5/loader)
- Pallete Cycling
- Moving Scroller Up/Down
- New Fade In/Out Routines
- New Interface for Intro Maker V2.0
- Save/Load Option
- Speeded up routines for compiling by 85%
- Change Left/Right area for scrollers
- and many many more!
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Here are what you will need before starting the intro maker V2.0
- A 320x200x256c gif
- 1 or 2 text files for use in the scrollers (can be upto 4096 bytes each)
- various other info which I will explain in the command section
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For the scroll texts here is an explanation of what the special characters
do. To get each of these special characters, hold down the ALT key and use
the numeric keypad for the #'s and then let off the ALT key.
ç (ALT 231) - Tells the scrolltext to "WRAP" around. MUST be the last
character in the scroll text file.
ñ (ALT 241) - Change color of text. Type this character and then the next
16 "CHARACTERS" you type are the colors for each line of the
text. For Example:
ñzd4E<lG¼öM
What this does is change the color for each line (16 of them)
in the text. You can choose your colors for each line from
the pallete of 256 colors so use the ALT key to get those
special characters (be sure not to use ç (ALT 231) cause it
will end your scrolltext.
If you have problems getting a special character or it will
not display it on your word processor, make a FAKE letter like
the letter A and then save your file and go into the file with
a sector editor (like norton's DISKEDIT) and change that letter
A to whatever special character you needed.
To help clarify this up some here are some examples.
If you want the pallete color # to be color # 127 then hold
down the alt key and type 127. if you want color # 62 then
hold down the ALT key and type 62.
ò (ALT 242) - Increase the speed of the scrolltext to the next level.
There are 4 different speeds on these scrolltexts and they are
0 (for stop),2,4, and 8. If you speed it up, make sure to
speed it down before ENDING the scrolltext cause the next time
it reads this character, it will speed it up again and if it
goes past speed 8, it will mess up! So be sure to follow
how fast your scrollers are going and make to "RESET" them at
the end of the scrolltext (before the ç character) to the
starting values you pick.
When the speed is 0, it will keep reading characters so you
must feed it BLANK letters like spaces untill you want it to
go again. The longer the BLANKS, the longer it STOPS.
ó (ALT 243) - Decrease the speed of the scrolltext.
ô (ALT 244) - Increase the step rate of the scrolltext. I think the limit
on the # of steps is 5 but you can try diffferent ones.
õ (ALT 245) - Decrease the step rate of the scrolltext.
ö (ALT 246) - Changes the direction the scroller is currently going.
The next character that follows decides what action it takes.
You have 3 choices for movement. U (for up),D (for down),
and S (for stop). All these letters must be in CAPITAL
to work! When you use öS for stopping then to get it moving
again, use either U or D.
÷ (ALT 247) - Changes the Font. The NEXT # you choose will decide which
font to use. You can choose numbers 1-5.
For Example:
÷3
changes the font to font #3
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COMMAND SECTION:
A) SCROLLER #1 ON? :Either answer Y for yes or N for no. This is if you
want only 1 or no scrollers. If you choose this option
to be N (OFF) then choose the next option to be
BLANK.TXT
B) FILENAME FOR TEXT :Choose the filename for the text you choose for
scroller #1. You must include the extension.
For Example: SAURON.TXT
If you do not want this scroller turned on then
choose the filename BLANK.TXT. This will save upto
4k in the final .exe after compression (PKLITE).
C) STARTING LEFT SIDE :The screen is made up of 320(0-319)pixels
horizontally. In my demo, I choose 10 for the
starting left side. You can either use a paint
program to determine this LEFT SIDE or just guess
a few times (ALOT OF TIMES) untill you get it right.
If you want the scroller to be the entire screen
horizontally (like Intro Maker V1.0), choose 0 for
this option.
D) LENGTH OF SCROLLER :This is how many pixels you want your scroller.
Again, you will have to either use a paint program
or guestamate it. For a entire horizontal scroller
you would choose this option to be 319(I think).
E) TOP LINE :This is for the moving scroller. When the scroller
bounces up and down, it has to have you set the top
and bottom boundries for it. Again, use the paint
program to get this value. There are 200 total
lines on a 320x200x256c picture. You can only choose
0-199 minus 16 (or 0-183). The reason for the biggest
number being 183 is that the font is 8x16 and it would
cause garbage on the screen and overlap buffers.
F) BOTTOM LINE :This is also for the moving scroller. Use your paint
program to get this #. Just remember to have the
bottom line 16 less than what you want cause it will
recoginize the bottom line at the top line of the
letter (and we are using an 8x16 font) so make it 8
less for an 8x8 font. You will see what I am talking
about when you experiment.
G) DIRECTION (D/S) :When the loader is ran, you must choose if you want
it to be moving up/down or standing still. Choose
D for the moving scroller and S for the STILL
scroller.
H) STEP RATE :Choose your starting step rate. Numbers 1-5 are good
and should work just fine. Higher than 5 may leave
"TRAILS". The bigger the number, the bigger "STEP"
the scroller will move each frame.
I) FONT # :You have 5 fonts to choose from (1,2,3,4,5).
Pick one of these fonts to start your scroller out
with. (Choose the fonts with commands 1-5)
J) SPEED (0/2/4/8) :These scrollers have 4 speeds to them. It is not a
good idea to start out your scroller with speed of
0 cause people will never see it (unless you use
special characters in your scrolltext to get it
going).
K) - T) :These options refer to SCROLLER #2. They mean the
same as options A-J.
U) PALLETE ROTATE? :If you want the colors to cycle then choose Y for your
answer, choose N if not.
V) STARTING PAL # :You can choose #'s from 0 to 255 for this one. Again
refer to your paint program for the starting color
to rotate.
W) LENGTH OF ROTATE :This is how many colors you want to cycle around.
If you want 16 colors to rotate from the starting
pal #, choose 16. If you want 10 colors to rotate
from the starting pol #, choose 10.
X) FADE IN # :In this version, you have 2 choices to pick from
for fading in the picture.
1 - Just like Intro Maker V1.0 which is the horizontal
blind type effect.
2 - This is going from a entire black screen to your
gif. Just like a light dimmer switch being
turned up.
Y) FADE OUT # :Same as option X but option 2 goes from your gif to
a black screen.
Z) GIF FILENAME :This is the filename of your 320x200x256c gif.
When supplying your gif filename, DO NOT INCLUDE .GIF
1) - 5) :You may choose 5 fonts to switch between during the
scroll text. If you only want 1 font, then be sure
to give the filename BLANK.FNT for the filenames
for the other 4. This will save space in the final
.exe. Each font usually takes up 1-2k of space after
compression (PKLITE)
8) LOAD SETUP :You may load your setup so you won't have to re-type
all the info in each time you run intro.exe.
This filename MUST include the extension.
I included SAURON.DAT with this version as the example
loader.
9) SAVE SETUP :Save all that important data to save time!
0) CREATE INTRO/LOADER:This is what starts it all! It will ask you the
filename to call this loader. DO NOT include the
extension .EXE to the filename.
Sit back and wait around 1 minute and it will be done!
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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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HAVING PROBLEMS? GETTING RUN-TIME ERRORS? If so, here's what you must do!
- You MUST have a command called COMSPEC in your autoexec.bat file.
FOR EXAMPLE:
set COMSPEC=C:\dos\command.com
or
set COMSPEC=C:\command.com
That is just 2 examples. INTRO MAKER V2.0 MUST know where your
COMMAND.COM is located by this statement. I use 4dos so mine is
set COMSPEC=C:\dos\4dos\4dos.com
- YOU MUST ENTER THE CORRECT "TYPE" of data. If it wants a number, it won't
accept a letter.
- You must have a 320x200x256c gif. A 320x200x16c will not do!
- If you knowtice the Hard Drive is not active after choosing option 0
then reboot your computer. From time to time, some TSR's will lock
up this program.
- Do not include the extension .GIF when you give the GIF filename.
- Do not include the extension .EXE when you give the LOADER SAVE FILE NAME.
ANY OTHER PROBLEMS AND CALL MY BOARD AND I WILL TRY TO HELP YOU OUT.
This is the only error's my BETA testers could come up with.
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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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I have included a program called LOADFONT.COM that will show you all the
fonts. Just type LOADFONT FONTNAME.FNT (where fontname is the name of the
font you wish to view).
And that's it! Just sit back for about 1 mintute and your intro will be ready
to run! You may have to enter different data many times to get the desired
effect you wish but as soon as you get the hang of it, it should only take
around 5 minutes to produce a quality intro!
Also, be sure to run a .EXE compressor on it like PKLITE.EXE. It should
shrink the size of the .EXE to around 85% to 95%. If you want your intro
to be smaller, just use a smaller size gif(byte wise).
- Sauron '91
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