From: pooler@aix02.ecs.rpi.edu (Robert Peter Poole)
Subject: Re: Rend24 version 1.05 -- has *anyone* gotten this thing to work?
Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1993 17:05:32 GMT

In article <1993Jan26.140237.6987@titan.tsd.arlut.utexas.edu> lofaso@tsd.arlut.utexas.edu (Bernie Lofaso) writes:
>pooler@rebecca.its.rpi.edu (Robert Peter Poole) writes:
>
>
>>This is the third time I've downloaded the Rend24 archive in the hopes of
>>getting it to work at all.  This time, I grabbed version 1.05, which is
>>apparently the latest (and according to the documentation, probably the
>>last).  As usual, I copied the support files to where they belonged -- i.e.,
>>copied the libraries to my libs: directory.
>
>>I can't make the damned program do anything useful.  Supposedly you can use
>>it to view ILBM, GIF, and JPEG.  I can't do anything of the sort with

[much of my own flamage deleted]

>
>O.K. Now that you've let off enough steam to boil a drum of crawfish, maybe
>you'd like to give at least the slightest bit of information about your
>set-up so you can get some constructive feedback about the problem. Droning
>on and on about how bad you think the program is isn't going to fix the
>problem much. Since I've only tried Rend24 on my A4000, I can only make
>statements for it, but it has worked flawlessly and quite well, and I have
>gone through a number of its features. Actually, now that I think of it,
>a friend has also run it on his A2000.
>
>Bernie Lofaso
>Applied Research Labs

My setup: Amiga 3000, Kickstart 39.106, 4 meg fast, 2 meg chip; KS is loaded
from hard disk (meaning that I only get to use 3.5 meg of fast RAM).  I have
tons of free hard drive space.  (Over 30 meg free on one partition alone.)
I do simple operations like: go into the pulldown menus, select Show Picture,
and it pops up an ASL requester.  I select a picture file.  (Doesn't matter,
I've tried it with IFF, GIF, JPEG, everything except dynamic hires and a
couple other strange IFF formats which the author clearly states he doesn't
support).  Then... nothing.  The program doesn't lock up, although I find that
the cycle gadgets stop responding to me for a few seconds.

What else would be useful information?

I mean, what gives?  Is this program trying to launch an external viewer?
(I know it will launch showanim if you try to display an anim from Rend24.)
The docs seem to indicate that Rend24 has its own image display code.

If Rend24 is running out of memory for conversion, why is there no indication
of this?  Reporting errors is a fundamental part of good coding.

After much fiddling, I *did* get Rend24 to convert a JPG file into an IFF.
That was the *only* time I saw Rend24 do anything besides sit there.  Not only
did it create a bar graph to show me how much of the conversion it had
completed, but it even displayed the converted picture (though, I might add,
displaying the final converted image with ViewTek and HamLab+ yielded quite
different qualitative results from the display generated by Rend24).

Ironically, once I did the image conversion, I tried viewing the converted
image from within Rend24.  Again, nothing.  The docs hint that the "View
Picture" option was good for examining the converted output.  I thought
perhaps I had been mistaken, that the "View Picture" option was ONLY used for
IFF files that had been created by Rend24.  Guess that's not the case either.

-- Rob Poole
pooler@rpi.edu
pooler@cs.rpi.edu
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.graphics