It works only on IDE or SCSI devices - so you can't play it on floppy disks. It can vary between 10 or 12 fps, and can be played on screen 8 or screen 12. Standard EVA resolution is 128x106, with sound at 15,75 KHz.
Advantages:
Pretty cool videos on your MSX!
Works on HDs, CDs and even DVDs. No size limitation (aside the media size or format limitations), so you can have really big movies.
Problems:
The biggest problem with EVA files is they can't be fragmented on disk, because the MSX player, to get better reading speeds, access those devices directly, reading sectors. If the file gets fragmented, then you'll have garbage on screen.
Since there is no compression at all on EVA files (There's no time to read the data, uncompress, write to screen and play it), they can get pretty big.
The file format
There are two sub-formats on the basic EVA file:
(the text below is a free adaptation from the one on EVA player source by Sergio Guerrero)
Format 1 - 10 fps
1 frame = 30 sectors = 15.360 bytes
Screen 12, 128 x 106 = 13.568 bytes, sound PCM 15,75 Khz = 1.575 bytes (variable, exact ammount indicated in the last two bytes of the frame). The rest is unused.
It's necessary to use double buffer for image and sound. You copy one frame into the unvisible VRAM page/sound buffer while showing the other. To reproduce the sound you have to sincronyze the PCM access with VRAM transfers and the sound buffer.
Format 2 - 12 fps
1 frame = 30 sectors = 15.360 bytes
Screen 12, 128 x 106 = 13.568 bytes, sound PCM 15,75 Khz = 1.312 bytes (variable, exact ammount indicated in the last two bytes of the frame). Image and sound are intercalated.
The Byte before the PCM SIZE (file offset 03BFDh) indicates the Screen format:
02 - Screen 08
The MSX EVA player is a command line tool. The Usage:
| Options | |
|---|---|
| /V | Vsync OFF |
| /8 | Force screen 8 format |
| /W | PCM sync OFF (MSX Turbo-R only) |
| /M | Force R800 ROM or Z80-B 6Mhz |
| /A | Force MSX-AUDIO |
| /X | Force Covox |
| /Sn | Start frame |
| /En | End frame |
| /C | Force 12fps |
| /L | Loop mode |
| /B filename | Load background image file (.SCC) |
| ESC | return to DOS |
| TAB | pause |
Comparison
 |
 |
| Video in Screen 8 format. Less colors (only 256 from a fixed palette - check Iron-man's legs in the picture) but more definition | Video in Screen 12 format. More colors (more than 19.000!), but less definition (see Thor's cape) due to Screen 12 limitations. |
Files
| EvaWin 0.5 | Windows player, can reproduce EVAs in screen 12 or screen 8 format. |
| AVI2EVA 0.8 | Converts AVI files to EVA format. You must have the proper codecs to play the AVI installed for it to work. |
| Eva player 0.11 | MSX eva player, fixed to auto-detect correctly screen 8 video files. |
| Sample Video #1 | Video in Screen 8 format |
| Sample Video #2 | Same video, but in Screen 12 format |