The JVF 2010-A is an LED sign that at it's heart is a 386 PC that runs DOS 5.0
You can get the main program for creating boot disks can be gotten here:
http://johniii.tripod.com/jvf.html
To create a disk, I recommend using Windows XP or below as Vista and above disabled the ability to create boot floppies. The resulting disk creates a 768 Kb Ramdisk and assigns it to C:.
Slideshows are a combination of images and scripts. Images are made by creating 16-color Windows bitmaps and using the utility program to convert them to DSN format. Slideshow scripts are text files ending with the .SHW extension.
The more images you use for your slideshow, the longer it will take to load from the disk. I recommend Googling pkunzip for DOS (pkz204g.exe), unpacking it and copy the pkunzip.exe file to the root directory of the boot disk.
Creating a slidwshow script can be created with three simple commands:
DLY_DSN 5000 (This should always start the script)
DSN eyes01 (This loads the dsn image file)
AP (This tells the LED board to display the image)
STOP 1 (This tells the board to hesitate for 10ths of a second. The bigger the number to longer the wait time)
DSN eyes02 (This loads the next image, etc).
AP
STOP 1
You can create animations from an animated gif. The resolution of the image should be 128 x 48. Each frame is converted to a bitmap. The bitmap should be as simple as possible to convert well, drawn images work best.
Personally, I use JASC Animation Shop along with Paint Shop Pro 6. I open the animated gif in Animation Shop, highlight all frames and paste them into Paint Shop Pro, which creates a separate image for each frame. From there, I make any changes to make it fit 128 x 48, reduce the colors to 16 and save each image to a Windows Bitmap file, each file with the number of the frame for easy reference (frame01, frame02, etc).
IF you use Gimp, you can convert them this way:
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For anyone who's interested, the way I'm making the animations in Gimp is as follows:
1) Load image and scale it correctly (128x48 ).
2) Make sure Image > Mode is set to RGB.
3) Set foreground color to black and background color to pure red (use HTML notation: ff0000). Reverse the foreground and background if you want to invert the colors.
4) Select Colors > Map > Gradient Map, which turns everything red.
(You could also use Colors > Colorize to accomplish this.)
5) Repeat the Gradient Map for all frames.
6) Select Image > Mode > Indexed.
7) Select "use custom palette" and click the palette button.
8 ) In the drop-down that appears, click "open the palette selection dialog" in the lower right.
9) In the window that appears, click "new palette." The palette editor opens.
10) Click "new color from foreground color." The color appears.
11) Right click the color, select "edit color," and make sure HTML notation is 000000. Hit okay.
12) Add another color, and set it to 880000.
13) Add a third color and set it to ff0000.
14) In the palette editor, click save.
15) Close the palette editor and drag your new palette from the palette window to the custom palette button in the Indexed Color Conversion window.
16) In the Indexed Color Conversion Window, set the dithering to whatever looks best (you'll have to try all of them).
17) Hit Convert.
Boom. You have a three-color image that reflects the color intensity of the original image.
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You can either directly copy the dsn files to the DSN folder on the floppy disk, or you can use PKZIP to create a .zip file which you copy to the root directory of the floppy.
Now create your .SHW script at the root directory of the floppy disk.
Using a zip file can cut down on the load time of the slideshow. Just edit the autoexec.bat file on the root directory of the floppy to this:
md c:\dsn
copy *.exe c:\
copy *.shw c:\
pkunzip slides c:\dsn
c:
jvff
This will create the dsn folder to the ramdisk and copy the main program as well. Then it will execute the main program. From there you can use the menu to launch the slideshow file you created.
I will update and create more pages as I learn more.
