Animated bitmaps?

[Zach Elfers]

Are animated .bmp's possible?

On a computer, the startup screen on Windows (where it says Windows 9x on the cloudy background) the bottom of the screen is moving. It is a small line and it is a gradient skyblue to white which is moving to show that it is loading. This image is a bmp even though it has an extension of .sys

The file is Logo.sys in case you don't know.

I was just wondering how bitmaps can be animated?

[jdavia]

Yes the logo.sys is a bmp. but it is not animated. that portion is done separate from the bmp. (mand who knows it might really be a DIB with a sys name).
There is such a file called DIB. (Device independant Bitmap)
I used to play around with it to make an animation. How I think it worked, (forgot):
You put several bmp files together something like this:
tt.bmp+aa.bmp+zz.bmp You highlight the three files and save them as a dib file. And it animated like a gif.
I will check back in my files to see if I can find it.

[jdavia]

Zach Elfers
[quote]I was just wondering how bitmaps can be animated?[/Quote}

Creating Movies which are in 3D. As the name (Lathe)implies all objects are rounded. They turn tumble, get larger and smaller.

The easiest way to create a movie is to let a program generate it for you. The µLathe application generates movies (called sequences) that are compatible with MiniMovie.

Another way to create a movie is to manually combine multiple BMP format bitmaps into a single DIB file. Use a program which supports the BMP file type (Paintbrush, for example) to create several bitmaps, one for each frame of your movie. Then, use the COPY command to concatenate the BMP files into a DIB.

The following statement combines every BMP file in the current directory, in the directory order, into a single DIB file called ANIMATE.DIB:

COPY /B *.BMP ANIMATE.DIB

The next few statements copy four bitmaps, BITMAP1.BMP, BITMAP2.BMP, BITMAP3.BMP, and BITMAP4.BMP, in that order, to a DIB file called MOVIE.DIB:

COPY /B BITMAP1.BMP MOVIE.DIB
COPY /B MOVIE.DIB+BITMAP2.BMP MOVIE.DIB
COPY /B MOVIE.DIB+BITMAP3.BMP MOVIE.DIB
COPY /B MOVIE.DIB+BITMAP4.BMP MOVIE.DIB

The program was written for Win 3.1 but I use it in win98.

[Zach Elfers]

Wow! Thanx jdavia.

[jdavia]

Originally posted by Zach Elfers
Wow! Thanx jdavia.

If you want to play around with the program,
GO HERE