Configuring your browser

To view the Animated Equations you should set your screen set to display at least 256 colours. You also need a movie player that can play MPEG movies.

Screen colours

The grey, red, green and blue bars in the image above should change smoothly from dark to light. If you see fewer than 16 different colours you should reconfigure your computer to display at least 256 colours.

On a PC running Windows 3.x, run Windows Setup from the Main program group. From the Options menu, select Change System Settings.... If the display is set to VGA you will need to change it to something with at least 256 colours. This may require the original Windows disks.

MPEG movies

The animations have been encoded as MPEG movies. Your browser may need a helper to play the MPEG animations. You can get MPEG players for most systems from www.mpeg.org/.

For Windows 3.1x systems, try VMPEG Lite. To install VMPEG Lite:

Create an installation directory, c:\vmpegi. Load vmpeg17.exe into this directory.
Run vmpeg17.exe, which will unpack the required files.
Run setup.exe, which will install VMPEG Lite in a new directory, c:\vmpeg.
Delete the c:\vmpegi directory and its contents.
Configure your browser to use VMPEG Lite as the helper for MPEG movies.

The first time you run VMPEG Lite it will test your display, which could take several minutes.

On a Macintosh, you will need a recent version of QuickTime and the QuickTime MPEG extension.

On Unix systems, xanim will play a variety of movie formats, including MPEG. It does not display interpolated frames, however, so playback will be a bit jerky. If your screen has only 256 colours, use the command

     xanim -CF4

You can test your browser by clicking on the following image, which is linked to a sample MPEG movie.