"How they did it"
=================

This is how the disks were created.  This information is taken from the Stag 6 disk.

First of all, we got hold of some pornographic videos. I know, I know, you shouldn't give money to slobbering criminals, but we did it anyway. Sent away money to a shop called Man Fashion in Oslo and Sandbergs in Sweden somewhere. We got back a lot of cassettes, most of which we hadn't ordered. But OK, porno's porno, like. 

We bought a VIDIAmiga digitizer from Rombo in England. Now we were all set, we thought. But, it wasn't to be that easy. For the first two Stags we borrowed a video machine with a good pause function, but it was really a pain to make the sequences. We used Rombo's own software for digitizing. Really hard to see how the sequences would look after shrinking and bouncing. We wrote a DOS command that shrinked the separate pictures and IFF-packed them into a sequence. As you all know, IFF-packing isn't all that effective, so the first two Stags had about 10 sequences each. Go back and take a look at those two disks. We're quite impressed they turned out so well. The first time we saw how the sequences behaved when played was when the disks was complete and finished. Either we were exceptionally lucky or we're genuises. 

But then, we got fed up with this rinky-dinky amateurish set up. We were ready for some heavy action! We went to a friend with a LARGE professional VCR. He also had an Archimedes. We wrote a program on the Amiga that digitized whole sequences by controlling the Archie which again controlled the VCR. The Archie controlled the VCR by sending it infra-red signals digitized from the remote-controll. Nice, huh? Anyway... All we had to after getting the whole thing set up was to find the scene we wanted to digitize on the VCR and tell the Amiga how many frames to skip between each frame to be digitized. The Amiga, Archie and the Panasonic did the rest. After the digitizing was finished the program entered edit mode and we could cut and edit the sequence so that it looked OK and was being shown in the appropriate speed. The program also displayed number of pictures in the sequence, and so on. It then automatically packed the pictures using Vincent's Bear-packing algorithm, joined them into sequences and saved them to disk along with info about length and speed. Couldn't be simpler, huh? Then all we had to was make the rest. (Bootloader, samples, graphics, track-saver & loader, replayer, double-buffering, scroller for italic letters etc. You know.) The scroll text font is by the way nicked from a Desktop Publishing Program on the Archie.