Short:        Example of the Fast SLZ compression routine
Architecture: m68k-amigaos

     A short while ago, I posted a new compression routine to C.S.A.P. that
featured extremely fast decompression.  The article is included in this
archive that describes the algorithms and has source code.  I have also
written a program that decompresses data to CHIP memory (the bat2bat.anim).
I have achieved very fast speeds with this (over 20 fps on an Amiga 3000/25
which is about 700K/second to CHIP MEMORY).  There is no double-buffering
of the animation.  The flicker that results is minimal though and is also
useful.  This is mostly due to the fact that I am using interleaved bitplanes
(they work under 1.3 even).  If you can count the lines of flicker, divide 60
by this number and you'll get a rough frame rate (50 on PAL).  Then if the
lines crawl down, you know you are actually going faster than this rough frame
rate and if the lines crawl up you are going slower than this frame rate.  Even
on a stock 68000, you should see at least 12 fps or about 400K/second
decompression to CHIP.  Note that although this is slower than the anim format,
it is NOT using delta compression -- it is using each frame compressed!  The
file is also smaller (even though it's an executable) than the original bat2bat
animation available on Aminet which also requires an external anim player.

     NOTE:  These high decompression speeds were achieved without turning
off multitasking with Forbid() and were running on a moderate/light loaded
system (Cygnus Ed, WorkBench, a CLI, WB Clock, and a couple of commodities
[Blanker, Exchange, CrossDos]).  The Amiga 3000/25 had 1 M CHIP and 4 M Fast
and the 68000 was an A2000 with 1 M CHIP and 2 M Fast.

     The source code to this animation will be made available at a later
date as I wish to integrate the tools I wrote to grab the animation and
change it into SLZ compressed form.  This way intermediate users will have
less difficulty with the animation environment.

Adisak Pochanayon
pochanay@cae.wisc.edu