Installation Guide for RUSSELL'S "P11" ANIMATION MACHINE Applications

INSTALLATION GUIDE

THE ANIMATED SOFTWARE COMPANY

Part 1: About the CD-ROM ALL ABOUT PUMPS

Normally the CD-ROM uses NO hard disk space and has NO installation procedure. It will run IMMEDIATELY by simply typing GO from the DOS prompt.

Part 2: About installing our downloadable software

Our products, other than those on CD-ROM, are shipped in compressed (also called zipped) format. Please see our guide to unzipping for information on how to decompress or unzip our software. Once installed, the programs normally should simply be able to run from the DOS prompt.

Part 3: When it doesn't work after installing our Software

The next section is an overview for those times when it doesn't work that way. Most problems can be easily identified and just as easily solved. If you have any problems using our software, the first thing to do is:

DON'T PANIC!

There are millions of unique systems and some hardware/software configurations don't always run right the first time. Service is our #1 priority and we want to help you. There are many ways to get support:

Best way:

Our web site is the best method of support. At the web site are all the latest answers to all questions. Our Internet web address (URL) is: http://www.animatedsoftware.com

Second way:

On the disks and CD-ROMs we distribute, we place many of the support documents as they exist at the time the disk is pressed. The first electronic document to look at on the disk is the README file in the root directory of every disk we ship.

If all else fails try this way:

You can also call write, fax, or call us at the address given below. When contacting us please include your name, an email address, and a phone number, and all the relevant information such as what program you were trying to run, what exactly happened, and what hardware you have. We will try to get you going.

TROUBLESHOOTING GUIDE

This brief guide is to familiarize you with the most likely problems so you can get more detailed help from our other sources.

Topics covered:

EXITING "P11" PROGRAMS
VIDEO PROBLEMS
HIGH MEMORY PROBLEMS--EMM and XMS
BASE MEMORY PROBLEMS
AUDIO PROBLEMS
OTHER PROBLEMS

EXITING "P11" PROGRAMS

Use ALT-Q to exit at any time. Press one of the ALT keys down and while holding it down press the letter "Q" to exit the program and return to DOS.

VIDEO PROBLEMS

ALL ABOUT PUMPS requires high-resolution video. Your computer's video card must have at least 1 megabyte of VIDEO RAM to run ALL ABOUT PUMPS. The card must also support the industry standard known as VESA, version 1.2. Most video cards now support the VESA video standard in hardware, and most others support it in software.

The monitor must also support high-resolution. Some laptops can support the high-resolution mode on the video card, but not on the built-in screen. Sometimes the program cannot detect this situation and you may only see only the upper left portion of the screen. Plug in a high resolution monitor to solve this problem.

THE HEART: THE ENGINE OF LIFE runs in three screen resolutions so video problems are less likely to occur. It will select the highest resolution it can, of the three. The three are 4-color CGA, 256-color MCGA, and 256-color SVGA. CGA and MCGA are 320 by 200 dots across and down the screen. SVGA is 1024 by 768 dots.

HIGH MEMORY PROBLEMS

Version 2.08 and earlier of ALL ABOUT PUMPS needed at least 2.8 megabytes of high memory and preferred 4 megabytes. The new version 3 needs 1984K, but still needs about 2.8 megabytes to run with nearly full animation, and 4 megabytes is still preferred.

There are two types of high memory and either type can be used. One is called EXPANDED MEMORY and the other is called EXTENDED MEMORY. These are usually abbreviated as EMM and XMS. P11 will not use (therefore, nor will any application programs written with solely it--) both types of memory at the same time. It will choose the one which can satisfy the application's demands if one can and one cannot, or it will choose the Expanded Memory (EMM) over Extended Memory (XMS) if both are available in the quantities requested by the application programmer. The amount requested depends on the needs of the program, of course.

THE HEART: THE ENGINE OF LIFE needs 1.0 megabytes of high memory for the medium and high-resolution modes but none for the low resolution mode.

Users of Windows may need to create a Windows PIF or startup file to tell Windows to give our program the necessary amounts of high memory -- either XMS, or EMM. By default Windows 3.1 and Windows 95 both give a DOS program only 1024K of high memory. Neither Windows 3.1 nor Windows 95 will release more than 1984K of XMS memory unless they shut themselves down, regardless of the amount of memory available on the machine. (We believe this is a bug in Windows.)

Windows is a great program and has helped to stabilize the industry for us. Our products generally run well inside of Windows.

NOTE #1: Expanded Memory (EMM) was originally designed by Lotus, Intel, and Microsoft, in a standard commonly known as "LIM 3.2", to be much faster than Extended Memory (XMS), because it was paged memory instead of swapped memory.

What this means is that with EMM, just by changing address pointers we can refer to different 16K 'pages'. XMS, on the other hand, physically transfers (swaps) the chunks of memory from one place to another because you can't access it directly in high memory. And you can't do it yourself, you have to tell the driver software to do it, which may or may not be well-written. Either way, this limitation changes something that can be done in 20 steps or so, (changing the address pointers), into something that takes at least 16,384 steps per 16K chunk, with no guarantee that those 16,384 steps are efficiently written!

With animations having individual frame sizes of 300K or more, and usually dozens of frames at the very least, this seemingly subtle difference can significantly impact maximum frame rate. Maximum frame rate is in fact usually the limiting factor when deciding how big and how smooth we can make each animation. Were this not true many of our animations would be bigger, smoother, and more beautiful.

As originally designed by Lotus, Intel, and Microsoft, EMM could be as much as 1,000+ times faster than XMS! Even poorly written code should be able to achieve 10+ or 100+ times better performance with EMM over XMS! But unfortunately, we have not noticed a significant difference on Windows 95 machines. Apparently Microsoft has implemented only true XMS in Windows 95. Expanded Memory (EMM), their own specification (with Lotus and Intel) is emulated in software instead of being implemented in hardware. To put icing on the cake, this probably means EMM is actually a little slower than XMS instead of faster like it should be!

If a future version of Windows supports real EMM as designed by Microsoft, Intel, and Lotus, it should be substantially faster than either XMS or emulated EMM. This does not mean that all our current animations will run faster (because their timing is artificially set regardless of machine speed), but it would mean that future animations could be larger and smoother. Current animations could still be placed on the screen faster, which would tend to make them smoother. I hope Microsoft fixes this some day and properly re-creates LIM 3.2 Expanded Memory! Of course, I may discover I'm wrong about what's going on, as I have no way of knowing what Microsoft actually has done, but something appears amiss.

NOTE #2: As if that wasn't bad enough, Microsoft Windows 95 may not give the program enough actual "real" XMS or EMM memory and might try to swap disk memory instead! (I guess that would make its implementation of EMM be an emulation of an emulation.) If you have less than 16 megabytes of high memory RAM on your machine Windows 95 may swap the 2.8 megabytes or so that we need for ALL ABOUT PUMPS. Why does it do this? I don't know, ask "Bill".

This can significantly slow the animations or make them jerky (and your hard drive light will flash). Our software contains some of the smoothest animations you will ever see on a computer so be sure to adjust Windows properly if necessary. Then we can all just get along.

BASE MEMORY PROBLEMS

BASE RAM is very fast memory but there is only 640K of it available It is also known as Conventional Memory. Our programs have been configured to use as little base memory as possible. If you are unable to even start the program at all this may be the problem. Most or our P11 programs need over 450K and some need as much as 512K of "free" conventional memory. The Editor version of P11 (used to create your own animation applications) needs about 70 to 100K more than the runtime version (the runtime version is used by all applications such as ALL ABOUT PUMPS, THE ENGINE OF LIFE, and so on).

To find out how much free conventional memory you have available, type mem at the DOS prompt. (See our DOS guide for more information.)

AUDIO PROBLEMS

Version 2.08 and earlier of ALL ABOUT PUMPS do not use audio but a small amount of audio has been added to version 3. THE HEART: THE ENGINE OF LIFE also has a small amount of audio. The digitized sounds require a Sound-Blaster or compatible and a BLASTER= statement in the computer's environmental configuration area. Windows appears to place these statements in the environment string as it should, however, there also appears to be a slight delay of audio which was supposed to be synchronized to animations on the screen, on some machines running Windows 95. The delay appears to be about one fifth of a second (1/5) or less. We are investigating why this is so but have not been able to determine if it is a correctable problem or not. Our guess is that Windows is either intercepting the signal for some reason or other and/or swapping it to disk, or it has a different priority for activities than DOS did. We don't know, but be aware that if audio tracks appear to clip a little off at the end and/or start a little behind the visual image, and you are running from a Windows 95 machine, it may not be correctable on current architecture.