#: 14024 S15/Hot Topics
    20-Jan-92  20:39:47
Sb: #14017-unknown mm/1 progs
Fm: Kevin Darling 76703,4227
To: Bob van der Poel 76510,2203 (X)

  "In attempting to make sense of the programs on my hard drive, I'm trying to
figure out what a number of them do!"

Yah, there's a lot of demo command thingies floating around out there... some
leftover from Rainbowfests and such.

  "iffs     - related to .iff files?"

I think that's a IFF slide show program.  Give it the name of a file which has
a list of pictures.

 "anim     - used by the mouse demo, but I have no idea of the file format"

Plays the really simple and bloated compression format I used when I converted
Amiga animations to the MM/1 and TC70 long ago.  Not much use otherwise.

  "fshow    - I think it has something to do with .fli files"

I think you're right.  Chd to your flicks dir, and try "fshow ademo >>/nil".
But first make sure the flis and sounds listed in "ademo" exist.  And don't try
to stop the sucker ... it uses all sorts of named pipes etc. Hmm.  You
can stop it... but it takes a lot of "kill" commands to do it :-)

  "pflicker - again, to do with .fli files"

Used by fshow.  Pflicker is the same as flicker (for showing flis), but
understands a limited set of commands ("play","wait","quit") from stdin and
sends "okay" to stderr when it's read in the file and is ready to play. I'm
coming up with a standard set of commands for programs like this.

With named pipes, this allows astonishingly easy setup of demos and even
multimedia (overused word! but true here) applications.  For instance, using a
fairly simple basic program and named pipes to communicate with commands to
playback sounds and minature flis, I've come up with a simple but neat looking
alphabet video kid's book.  It could almost be done from a scriptfile.