Ace Film

Revision as of 19:37, 22 August 2013

Overview

Ace Film is an animation file format used on early RISC OS systems (file type D6A, AceFilm), allowing graphics created using Ace Computing's applications to be stored as a series of frames in a file, to be replayed layer using the Projector application. Applications used to generate Ace Film files included Tween, Mogul and Euclid.

Notes

[Ed. note: Need more sources/research. The files from Arcade BBS don't seem to match this format (title actually begins at offset 0x2).]

[Author's note: Agreed. The files I have follow the format described below, but those from Arcade BBS seem to be different. I should have paid a bit more attention to that.]

All lengths and offsets are in bytes. Words are 4 bytes.

   0x0:    File length (4 bytes)
   0x4:    Title (12 bytes, ASCII, low bytes ignored, can contain spaces)
   0x10:   Offset into the file of data (data_offset)
   0x14:   
   0x18:
   0x1c:   Number of colours?

Each frame is described by a data length followed by the data itself, then followed by the data length again, presumably to make it easy to traverse the file in both directions:

   data_offset:    length of data (including this word) (data_length)
   ...
   data_offset + data_length - 4: data_length

References

• The Unofficial Acorn Filetypes List
• Arcade BBS Filebase search for "ace film"