Apex Media...

Apex Media is a graphics package designed for the Atari Falcon030 computer. It was made for the following tasks:

> producing and editing computer art and animation for games and demos

> pixel-painting 'sprite' objects and animations for games

> capturing images or video from digitizers for processing

> producing fullscreen animation / video titles

Having worked in the games industry for a long time, Apex was influenced by my experiences integrating graphics content with computer games and graphics engines - in the early days much of that time was spent using programs including the fantastic CyberPaint II and Animator. This can be felt when using Apex!

Apex had a reasonably diverse featureset for graphics software of it's time and despite having a custom UI and fixed display modes, was able to edit multi-frame canvasses of flexible size which were compressed and defragmented in realtime, allowing a small number of very large images or a very large number of animation frames with limited changes between each.

This was one of the first products to use the Falcon's DSP. The morphing animation system and various image processing tasks depended on it.

The program was built around the 1996-97 timeframe in 100% 68030 assembly language, with some DSP56001 accelerated components.