Fork

This is a fork of gif320 to fix memory errors and work on modern systems. It compiled and mostly worked as it was, but there were a number of bugs that I assume just didn't come up when it was compiled/ran on systems of 34 years ago.

Windows build

The fork includes a Visual C++ project for Windows builds:

msbuild gif320.vcxproj /p:Configuration=Debug /p:Platform=x64

The executable is written to bin/<platform>/<configuration>/gif320.exe. The MSVC build defines DONT_USE_SIGNAL and opens GIF input/output streams in binary mode so pipe-mode rendering can be compared byte-for-byte against other implementations on Windows.

Unix/Linux build

The Makefile builds with gcc:

make

Equivalently, the compatibility tests can build the original executable directly with:

gcc -std=c99 -Wall -g -o gif320 develop.c primary.c misc.c readgif.c vtgraph.c

Here it is running on a modern Ubuntu Server system with my VT320:

Sample image source

Original README.md follows:

GIF320

GIF320 is a GIF viewer for DEC VT320 terminals:

Thanks to C Powers, who sent on this photo of GIF320 in action on a still-extant VT320, in 2024! Apparently this ancient code still compiles on a modern Ubuntu.

The original README, from 33 years previously, is below.

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GIF320 3.0 is a gif file viewer for use with VT-320 terminals. It should be easily portable to any platform as it uses only printf and several other stdio commands; some signal trapping and tilde-globbing is also provided, but can be configured out.

Note that GIF320 uses some obscure character-set definition escape sequences, so if you use a VT-320 emulator or a VT-320 clone, it may not work. It will not work on a 220 or a 420, although the 420 claims to emulate a 320. Unfortunately, I don't have access to a 420, so I'm looking for someone with a VT-420, a manual, and intricate knowledge of escape sequences to hack on one for me and find out why not. Anyone fitting that description out there?

A manual page is provided; if you are running GIF320 on an nroff-less system, a pre-formatted manual page, gif320.txt, is also enclosed.

If you are on a system running VAX/VMS, a Makefile-emulation script VMS-MAKE.COM is provided; see README.VMS for more information.

See config.h for configuration options.

• doctorgonzo jm@maths.tcd.ie

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Architectures GIF320 has compiled successfully (and worked ;) on:

Tahoe running 4.3 BSD UNIX
MIPS Magnum running RISC/os 4.51
Sparc running SunOS 4.1.2