ANIM brush format Dpaint Anim Brush IFF Format From a description by the author of DPaint, Dan Silva, Electronic Arts The "Anim Brushes" of DPaint III are saved on disk in the IFF "ANIM" format. Basically, an ANIM Form consists of an initial ILBM which is the first frame of the animation, and any number of subsequent "ILBM"S (which aren't really ILBM's) each of which contains an ANHD animation header chunk and a DLTA chunk comprised of the encoded difference between a frame and a previous one. To use ANIM terminology (for a description of the ANIM format, see the IFF Anim Spec, by Gary Bonham). Anim Brushes use a "type 5" encoding, which is a vertical, byte-oriented delta encoding (based on Jim Kent's RIFF). The deltas have an interleave of 1, meaning deltas are computed between adjacent frames, rather than between frames 2 apart, which is the usual ANIM custom for the purpose of fast hardware page-flipping. Also, the deltas use Exclusive Or to allow reversable play. However, to my knowledge, all the existing Anim players in the Amiga world will only play type 5 "Anim"s which have an interleave of 0 (i.e. 2) and which use a Store operation rather than Exclusive Or, so no existing programs will read Anim Brushes anyway. The job of modifying existing Anim readers to read Anim Brushes should be simplified, however. Here is an outline of the structure of the IFF Form output by DPaint III as an "Anim Brush". The IFF Reader should of course be flexible enough to tolerate variation in what chunks actually appear in the initial ILBM. FORM ANIM . FORM ILBM first frame . . BMHD . . CMAP . . DPPS . . GRAB . . CRNG . . CRNG . . CRNG . . CRNG . . CRNG . . CRNG . . DPAN my own little chunk. . . CAMG . . BODY . FORM ILBM frame 2 . . ANHD animation header chunk . . DLTA delta mode data . FORM ILBM frame 3 . . ANHD animation header chunk . . DLTA delta mode data . FORM ILBM frame 4 . . ANHD animation header chunk . . DLTA delta mode data ... . FORM ILBM frame N . . ANHD animation header chunk . . DLTA delta mode data DPAN Chunk Format ANHD Chunk Format RIFF