Thad's sonique plugin, by Thad.  Version 2.2  November 2000
Displays a "spiral", that distorts & changes colour in time with the music.
(c) 2000 T. Frogley 
email codemonkey_uk@hotmail.com

!!! PLEASE READ THIS FILE !!!

Introduction
============
Thad's Sonique plugin is a configurable colour blended spiral which dances to the music.  This is a single effect plugin.  I chose to write a single effect plugin because the rappa is such an excellent mixer there is no need for anyone to write multiple effect plugins.  If you take the time to play with the configuration options I think you'll find a look you like at a CPU cost you can afford.  (That said, this is a CPU heavy plugin, as it does per pixel, production level, colour and pattern generation which is intrinsically hard to do.)

Configuration
=============
Thads's Sonique plugin can be configured via the "vis.ini" configuration file.  Please take the time to do so.

zoom
----
How "zoomed" out you are from the image.  Could have been called "scale" ...
As the spiral is fractal in nature, zooming out, for all practical purposes, increases the sensitivity of the response to music.  Defaults to 1, try setting it to 10 for a *really* busy visual.

arms
----
Number of "arms".  With the current colour set up, each "arm" consists of a big red stripe, and a small blue stripe (but this depends on the tone and pitch of the music).  Defaults to 3.  Try anything from 1 upwards. 

mode
----
0 - alpha blended (default)
    Use Sonique's "VisFX/effects level" slider to adjust the colour suturation!
1 - saturated add (loose the subtle gradients, but gain nice overlap effects)
    Use Sonique's "VisFX/effects level" slider to adjust the brightness!
2 - 50% transparent blit (like 0, trades quality for speed)
    Use Sonique's "VisFX/effects level" slider to adjust the colour suturation!
3 - solid (fastest mode, but can look jittery)
    VisFX have no effect in this mode.

Modes 0 and 1 produce "production quality" animation.  
Modes 2 & 3 are both compromises on mode 0.

Release History
===============

New in 2.2
----------
Now swings both ways, switching on the beat! ;)
New (improved?) colour selection algorithm (does not effect mode 1)
The vis is also now a few percent faster.

New in 2.1
----------
Fixed alpha channel banding problem (smoother colour blending).  
Added dithering (yes, I'm dithing 24bit colour values on the fly).
Optermisation (yes I did all that and made it faster.)
Added fps config option, set to nonzero to display frames per second.

New in 2:
---------
Looks much better.  
Dynamic colours, colour blending, VisFX (only zoom is noticable in practice).

Also, now user configurable (try it!).
Added configurable settings, in vis.ini (see above).