Really grateful I came across this message board/community.

I’m wondering how difficult/plausible it would be to program a VB to play a short loopable animation like a .gif ? I’ve done a tiny bit of programming and am wondering if this is something I could learn and put together in a few weeks for an art show I’m working on?

Any thoughts and or recommendations for resources would be a huge help..

That actually does sound very simple. It depends a bit on the complexity of your animation but in general should not be a big deal.

I would suggest to grab the vbde (virtual boy development environment) from here: http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?post_id=30868#forumpost30868 and have a look at the demos.

There are some very basic (but also old) beginner demos here as well: http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=4089&forum=2

I also once published a tool that allows you to put together animations without doing much programming. It comes with an older version of vbde (you still have to put it into C:\vbde) The tool is still pre-alpha, poorly documented and I doubt anyone ever used it.

You have put all of your animation frames onto one 512×512 image. The tool will allow you to map your colors to red/black values, define sprites and animations and apply actions to them (like moving around).

You can find the tool here: http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?post_id=29439#forumpost29439

Here is a video showing it a bit: http://youtu.be/VK14AuZZoDc

Here are some pictures and more info: http://www.planetvb.com/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=5584&forum=

Indeed, that would be quite simple. I suggest you use my program VBIMGC to convert the animation frames into VB format (note: you will have to use a batch file or something because it is not really designed for full-screen animations like this).

The tricky part would be getting the animation to fit on a 2 MB FlashBoy. If there aren’t many frames and/or the resolution isn’t very high, you might get away without any compression (the VB should be fast enough to load frames in real time). If the frames contain areas of repeating 8×8 patterns, then RLE would be a good choice because it’s simple and fast to decompress.