1. 2979 converted with: DATimage.exe *.png -mic2 -mtc2 (pretty quick)
2. 2979 Loaded as layers in a .psd file (used Adobe Bridge) (.5 hrs)
3. 2979 Compiled into 1 giant sprite sheet via photoshop script (4hrs 15 minutes)
*Number 3. is solved building a sprite sheet with several images is much faster with this method
Use imagemagick to get the job done in a few minutes (requires your PC to have some decent RAM avalaible)...Thanks for the tip Glinkie!
https://www.imagemagick.org/script/download.php
This is the syntax I used....
magick montage RottenApple/*.png -tile 30x100 -geometry 320x224+0+0 -background transparent RottenApple.png
A breakdown on all the flags can be found here.... http://acamara.es/blog/2012/12/assembling-sprite-sheets-with-imagemagick/ ,,,Thanks again Glinkie!
More notes
In the end I used 30 columns and 100 rows (30x100) because 1 column and 2979 rows cannot be opened by photoshop or even windows photo viewer.
The height must exceed what those programs have coded as a .png's max height. I got lucky that 30x100 opens in viewers.
4. Index the new RottenApple sprite sheet. It contains 111 colours. Reindex at 16 colours including transparency.
5A. 2979 images in the form of one sprite sheet compiled through Buildchar with chardata.xml (Out of Memory) my 2 GB microsoft surface crashes first the output monitor looses video then the surface goes blank for a second needs to be restarted twice to restore video to monitor 2.
5B. 2979 images in the form of one sprite sheet compiled through Buildchar with chardata.xml (Out of Memory) my 4 GB Pentium Dual Core Toshiba laptop crashes.
The resolution adjusts and adds borders to the left and right side of the screen. That's not normal.
5C. 2979 images in the form of one sprite sheet compiled through Buildchar with chardata.xml (4hrs Later) i7 16GB of ram
What I can say is the archive contains the unified .png (4hrs 15minute file) and the notorious bk0Char.bin (that took 4 hours to build)
I believe if you broke up the .bin you could split it across two banks...I tried to compile on Bank0 and got an error about the rom being full.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/tx9hifc4bmarieo/RottenApple_BANK0.zip?dl=0
Conclusion this was a very cool effort in my eyes. 3000 frames! 4 minutes of animation! The possibility of cramming even more Mega Shock in for later.
Has BuildChar ever worked so hard? Only HPMAN knows the true answer to that.