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Gary Storm cooks up a cool looking Workbench using only 16 colours.

Unless you have a graphics card, it can be difficult to get a good looking Wb. If you go 32 colours to make all your icons and backgrounds look great, your miggy slows to a geriatric pace, and eats up all your chip ram.

We're going to give you a recipe, and help you cook up a 16 colour Wb, and make it look nearly as good as 32, keeping the speed and chip ram intact. I'll also tell you of a few essential utilities to let your Wb kick ass even more.

To mix it all together you'll need an Amiga, a hard drive, and some time:)

Right, for those of you without (or even with, if you want) multi-sync monitors, first of all you're going to need to install 'Magic TV2', which will give you a high-res-interlace screen with barely any flicker, but limits you to 16 colours, which is what we want anyway. All you need to do is grab this brilliant little utility, put it into C:, and it add to your 's:startup-sequence' before 'SetPatch'. So the begining of your startup-sequence looks like this:

; $VER: startup-sequence 39.9 (9.8.92)
C:SetPatch QUIET
MagicTV
C:Version >NIL:

Simple, eh?

Next, grab a copy of 'Full Palette', which will lock the 16 colours of your Workbench into the best selection. Whack the FPPrefs program into your C:directory too then add the following to your s:startup-sequence just after the C:IPrefs line:

Run >NIL: FPPrefs

Then copy the FullPalette program into your Prefs drawer and use it to set up the colours. I used the palette suggested by the author of MagicTV. Set the Full Palette colours manually to the values in the Palette boxout, and don't forget to make sure they're all 'locked'.

Palette

No.	Name	4-bit			8-bit
		R	G	B	R	G	B
0	Grey 4	9	9	9	153	153	153
1	Black	0	0	0	0	0	0
2	White	15	15	15	255	255	255
3	Blue	3	6	10	51	102	170
4	Grey 3	8	8	8	136	136	136
5	Grey 6	12	12	12	204	204	204
6	Light Brown	12	9	6	204	153	102
7	Yellow	13	11	3	221	187	51
8	Purple	9	4	10	153	68	170
9	Red	13	2	2	221	34	34
10	Grey 1	2	2	2	34	34	34
11	Dark Blue	0	5	9	0	85	153
12	Grey 2	5	5	5	85	85	85
13	Grey 5	10	10	10	170	170	170
14	Green	2	8	2	34	136	34
15	Light Blue	5	10	11	85	170	187

Next you'll need to install the NewIcons patch. Go through the installation process, but say 'no' to 'do you want to install New-Icon icons?'. Or you could say yes if you want to save yourself some work, but have a Sesame Street Workbench.

Now that you've done that, you'll need a decent set of icons and backgrounds to jazz up your Wb. I used to prefer 'Magic Wb' icons as I think the 'NewIcon' icons look kiddy. Fortunately other people alsothought the same thing, and drew their own icon sets using the 'NewIcon' patch (which let's you use 32 colour icons, instead of the default 8 colour icons). My favourite icon sets are 'Glow-Icons' which are gorgeous and glow when you select them (the artist, Matt Chaput, works for Silicon Graphics, and is doing the icons for OS3.5) and 'Archeologicons' which are realistic things from archeology (funny that) from all over the world. I've also used a tree frog as my RAM icon, from 'TreeFrogIcons', believe it or not.

There are plenty of NewIcon icon sets on Aminet, CU Amiga and Amiga Format CD's, so take a look and choose your weapons. Whichever NewIcons you go for, they'll map themselves to the closest colours in your palette, and look nearly as good as if you had a 32 colour Wb. Just install 'Icon Installer' (I installed it into 'Tools') and use that to decorate your screen.

Right, that's the screenmode, palette and icons taken care of - but your background still looks cack, eh?

Here's where a handy little dabbling in P-Paint does the trick (thanks to master-chef Robert for the recipe!). This is the part which is kind of like basting the turkey and stuffing it into the oven.

Your Wb is limited to 16 colours, which everything must share. That's why we've locked them, so nothing pinches colours just for itself, and leaves the crappiest ones for the little sibling too small to get the better ones:). This is why we need to convert any background patterns or pictures you'd want to use, to the same palette that your Wb now uses. Ready?

1. Load up PPaint (it helps:) ).
2. Go to the 'Image Format...' item in the 'Projects' menu and change the colours to 16.
3. In the 'Settings' menu you'll see 'Dithering'.....tick 'Floyd-Steinberg' and 'Best Quality'. Now you're ready to start magicking!
4. 'Load' in your selected 16 million colour Wb pattern, and select the 16 colour 'Current format' when the Load image requester appears:
   PPaint will now convert that pattern to 16 colours, and it doesn't look too bad eh? But don't even think about saving that one, because PPaint has done the clever thing and mapped down the pattern to the best 16 colours it could salvage from the original palette. Now you have to convert that 16 colour pattern to your palette, and this is where PPaint is very quick and handy.
5. In the 'Palette' sub-menu of the 'Colour' menu, select 'From Screen...'. A window will appear with all the screens you have open, so you can select to use one of the palettes. Select 'Workbench Screen'.
6. Now, also in the 'Colour' menu, select 'render', and bosh!! instant (nearly) 16 colour pattern with your palette.
7. If it looks ok (if a bit grainy - but remember it won't look so grainy when used on your Wb, as it will be much smaller) then select the cutting tool '[ ]', press 'F9' followed by 'F10' to get rid of the toolbars, and drag the mouse from the top left to the bottom right, making sure you cut one pixel in from the edge, and cut!
8. Then bring back the toolbars (F9 and F10 again) and save your brush. Renaming it to 'whatever_16.bsh' makes it easier to keep track of later.

I did the above with all of the eyepoppers patterns (originally 256 colour patterns), and about 70% were good enough to keep as 16 colour patterns. You can grab them off me if you want. I also converted some 256 colour full-screen 3d pictures, which came out pretty well. I'd suggest that you make dedicated 16-colour patterns drawer, probably in your 'Prefs' directory.

To add a random bootpicture which fades in and out every time you boot up, whack 'Picboot' into c: and add some commands (depending on where your boot picture directory is, and whatever preferences you have) to your 'startup-sequence', here's the section of my mine, for reference:

C:picboot System:WBgfx/BootPics/#? DETACH CENTER YES DEFAULT YES FI 2 FO 2 DELAY 500 PATCH

And there you go, a tasty 16 colour Workbench! Not a replacement for a graphics card, that's for sure, but it's the best looking Wb you can get without one (keeping chip RAM and speed intact) .

Ingredients

Program	Author	Aminet Directory
Magic TV2	Neil Crawforth	util/wb
Full Palette	Massimo Tantignone	util/wb
Icon Installer	Tom Ekstrom	util/wb
NewIcons	Eric Sauvageau	util/wb
Glow Icons	Matt Chaput	AmigaOS 3.5 from amiga.com
Archeologicons	Lyle Zapato	pix/nicon
TreeFrogIcons	Lyle Zapato	pix/nicon
PPaint	Cloanto	www.cloanto.com or your favourite Amiga dealer.
Eye Poppers	Giles C. Hendrix	pix/back