I have a slow Amiga 2000 (020/14MHz+882/25MHz) with 5.6 GB of SCSI hard disk
space.
When I try to use a web browser the decoding time for pictures stored as GIF,
PNG or JPEG is several magnitudes longer than the donwload time. Since ILBM
pictures displays a whole lot quicker then the previously mentioned formats
would it be possible to convert downloaded pictures into ILBM and store them
as such in the browser hard disk cache?
I seem to remember some argument about it wasting to much space since ILBM
pictures aren't heavily compressed (compared to the three common formats) which
presumably is why they displays so much quicker on my aging machine.
And please don't respond with platitudes such as get yourself a 040/060 or PPC
card. I have considered that for other reasons.
Web browsing is not a particular enjoyable experience such as my machine now
works. Even when pictures are located in the cache and I click on the back
button in Voyager 2.95 it takes minutes to display the page again.
Hard disk space is cheap today, even cheaper than CPU's.
I know that ILBM files probably can't be used with some amount of the pictures
available on today's web pages but at least some of them should be convertable.
Even if you had to compromise with the picture quality by using dithering there
wouldn't be any huge difference for me since my ECS machine uses 16 colours on
its Voyager screen and most pictures already look ugly on it.
/Mats-Olov Rustad
