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| IIGS Finder with a background and icons from ImagesA2.BB4 |
Over the decades I managed to amass a large number of Apple II graphics of various sorts. Mostly downloaded from online services such as America Online, GEnie, Delphi, or acquired from computer trade shows and disk magazines. My interest peaked in the early 90’s when I was using GraphicWriter III to publish the Apple Users Group of Michiana newsletter. For the most part I never did anything with most of the graphics except to categorize and organize them into subfolders based on type and subject matter.
In the last few years I developed the A2.Jukebox program which shows a slideshow of HGR graphics while playing simple music, and the Breeze program launcher which allows browsing many graphics types thanks to Karl Bunker’s Sneeze routines.
Though I never learned 6502 assembler, I have often used routines developed by others to meet the needs of my BASIC programs. In this case I decided to develop a BASIC slideshow program that could display 3200 and 3201 mode graphics on a IIGS. I wanted my program to have several features that would make it unique:
- ability to traverse the ProDOS directory to display pictures in subdirectories, rather than requiring all pictures to be in a single directory or listed in a text file
- ability to auto-advance through the slideshow
- ability to repeat the slideshow
- ability to pause
- skipping over locked files and locked directories so that problematic files can be bypassed without having to delete them or move them
This led to the development of a BASIC programs Slideshow.320x and a 32 MB disk image of 320x graphics to accompany it. The disk image is called ImagesGS.320x. Slideshow.320x can display 3200 and 3201 graphics, but no other graphics types.
To display other graphics types I developed BASIC.Slideshow, which can display HGR, DHR, and SHR pictures and Slideshow.AXE which can display AXE compressed HGR pictures. Ideally a single Slideshow program would be able to display all of these picture types, but I haven’t been able to get a consolidated version working. One good thing that has come from this is that I am told by the developer of A2 Desktop that version 1.6 will be able to display AXE packed HGR graphics.
In addition to ImagesGS.320x there are 4 32 MB disk images of other Apple II graphics, all of which include BASIC.Slideshow as well as a number of other graphics viewers, utilities, and applications.
ImagesA2.BB1 contains a collection of HGR, DHR, and some SHR graphics. This is suitable for any ProDOS capable Apple II. The program BASIC.Slideshow is included which can display HGR, DHR, and SHR graphics in a slideshow, traversing the directory tree.
ImagesA2.BB2 contains a collection of SHR graphics viewable on a IIGS. The program BASIC.Slideshow is included which can display HGR, DHR, and SHR graphics in a slideshow, traversing the directory tree.
ImagesA2.BB3 contains a collection of SHR Clip Art graphics viewable on a IIGS. The program BASIC.Slideshow is included which can display HGR, DHR, and SHR graphics in a slideshow, traversing the directory tree.
ImagesA2.BB4 includes SHR desktop images, PrintShop GS images from SDGS, and a large assortment of IIGS Finder icons, including my own Copland icons. I’ve included a number of icon editors on the image as well.
While developing these disk images I found that I had duplicates of many graphics, primarily because I had acquired some files from French disks where the graphics had been renamed, though otherwise unchanged. Lacking a tool to identify duplicate Apple II pictures I decided to develop one. DupePicFinder is a BASIC program that can analyze graphics (BIN, $C0, and $C1 files), assigning a content-based key that can be used to recognize duplicates. It creates a text file that can be imported into an application like AppleWorks GS, and then sorted so that files that have the same content-based key are grouped, making it easy to decide which pictures to manually examine. While this process is not perfect and cannot identify duplicate pictures that have different formats, it proved to be helpful and fairly effective.
My Xtra8Bit 32 MB disk image has also been updated with the latest version of Breeze and the new BASIC programs.
Download them all for free from the Apple II section of the Silverwand Software site at https://sites.google.com/view/silverwandsoftware/apple-ii-forever
