Fresh Fish 5/FreshFish_July-August1994.bin/bbs/pix/isoicons8.lha/IsoIcons8/README.PLEASE

Text File | 1992-08-04 | 7.6 KB | 145 lines

Well, here they are: 8-color icons for WB 2.04.  These icons are nearly
exact duplicates of the 16-color icons designed by Roger McVey, with a few
additions for icons that he did not include, and a few edits to some of the
icons that I felt could be improved.

About this archive:

The first thing that you will notice is the LHA-within-a-LHA.  The inner
archive is s non-compressed storage-only archive, and the outer archive
handles the compression.  For a bunch of small files like this collection
of icons, doing things this way results in a significant size savings.  If
this archive had been compressed in the traditional way, it would have been
88979 bytes.  As it is it only comes to 66234, a savings of 22745 bytes!
Harldy insignificant.

The orginal archive was laid out as if Mr. McVey simply archived all files
on his hard drive that matched the pattern #?.info, directory structure and
all.  I cannot dispute his artistic abilities (I never could have designed
such attractive icons from scratch), but I found his organization a bit
lazy.  So, for the 8 color archive I have organized it a bit differently.

The three main drawers (2.0Install, Workbench2.0, and Extras2.0) contain all
of the icons normally found on the Amiga OS release 2.04 disks.  None of the
actual programs or data are included.  I have tried to duplicate the
position and size of the various drawers as well as possible, but since the
aspect ratio of a 33x40 icon is little different than the stock 54x22 icons,
some things have had to move.  Nobody is going to use these on a
non-interlaced screen anyway, so it shouldn't be a problem.

The fourth drawer, DH0, contains a few icons for utilities that I use and
have stored on my HD (but no duplications of anything in the first three
drawers).  Not all of the icons in the original 16 color set have been
inlcuded.  As a matter of fact, asside from those used for the system
disks, very few have been.  Frankly, I couldn't see the point in converting
a whole slew of icons that I myself neither need nor want.

If you cannot find an icon in this archive that you simply MUST have, I
suggest getting a copy of Mr. McVey's 16 color icon set (found in an archive
called RBMICONS.LHA) and converting the needed icons yourself.  I toyed with
the idea of including the master directory I made of these 16 color icons,
but that would have added an additional 150K to this archive.  Perhaps I
will upload them separately at a later date, but since they are not actually
MY own creations, I am a bit hesitant to do this....

Why 8 colors instead of 16?  There are two reasons.

First of all, speed.  The bit-blitter in the current non-AA ECS Agnus is
capable of moving three bitplanes around on the Workbench screen as nearly
as quickly as two bitplanes, since the interleaving of the CPU/custom chip
clocks allow for enough time to do this.  Actually, there isn't -quite-
enough time, so there is a slight performance penalty involved in going to
8 colors as opposed to four, but the additional colors are IMHO well worth
the tiny bit of slowdown incurred.  However, when you go to 16 colors, the
blitter simply cannot move the data in the time alloted to it, so it
"steals" clock cycles from the CPU, causing a very notcable drop in
system performance.  This can be helped by using a few software patches to
the system (like CPUBlit, and the various vector relocating utilities), but
IMHO this extra trouble is not worth the additional colors.  A simple rule
of diminishing returns applies here. Ever notice how a 32 color Amiga screen
looks only a -tiny- bit worse than a 256 color IBM VGA screen?  Similarly,
an 8 color screen is only a slight bit worse off than a 16 color one, and
you save a ton of CPU time.

Secondly, size.  Even if the speed issue becomes a moot point with the
impending release of the AA chipset, the size of the icon files will not be.
The original 16 color icons were ALL over 2000 bytes in size.  Striping a
single bitplane off of them has reduced them by 25%, to about 1500 bytes.  I
can't speak for every Amiga user, but -my- hard drive doesn't have unlimited
storage capacity, and every 500 bytes is a full disk block saved.

Installation:

If you are willing or able to re-install the 2.04 release, the easiest
thing to do would be to make duplicates of your system disks, copy these
icons onto them and then install the OS.  The new icons will be put into
their proper places.  However, most people will find this unacceptable or
impossible (I know I would).  So you have a few more options as well.

A small AmigaDOS script has been provided called simply enough Install.
This is just a recursive list that replaces any icons on your SYS:
partition that matches the name of any icon in this archive with the new
imagery.  The only real problem with this is if you have a app that has a
name identical to one of the system files, yet has a completely different
function, or if you already have custom icon imagery.  The script does not
distinguish either of these conditions.  It will blissfully copy new icons
over the old images regardless of the purpose of the program.  So don't
blame me if your favorite text editor ends up with a disk-like icon (you
probably shouldn't have named it "Format" anyway 8-)

Also included is the program SwapIcon.  This is pretty easy to use.  Single
click on the SwapIcon rogram, then shift-click on the NEW image, then
shift-double-click on the OLD image.  Pretty simple.  If you get confused,
double-click on SwapIcon and you'll get a little instruction box.

Or, if you are real picky, you can manually copy selected icons to thier
proper places.  If you wanna do it this way, be my guest.  You must have a
lot more free time than I do.

And more as a matter of courtesy than anything is the palette that was used
to create these icons.  You may use it as reference, delete it, or (god forbid)
even use it, if you so desire.

A warning:

If you do decide that the icons for that favorite app is not here and do a
conversion yourself, be very carefull!  Amazingly enough, If you load a 4
bitplane (16 color) icon into IconEdit on a 3 bitplane WB screen, and then
save it out, the fourth bitplane is NOT stipped off unless there is not a
single pixel that contains any of the upper eight colors.  You won't be
able to tell if this is true, because if there are more colors in the image
than you have on your workbench, the image colors "wrap-around" to simply
repeat the first set.  So you might have two blue pixels right next to each
other that are DIFFERENT colors; one might be color 4 (blue) and one might
be color 12 (also blue, since 12-8=4).

If the fourth bitplane is left intact, the new 8 color version will STILL
be 2000 bytes in size.  The speed is the same as any other 8 color icon,
but why waste a disk block, right?

One way that I found to check for this is to change your WB to 16 colors
(temporarily... you'll see what I mean about slowdown), and change the
palette so that all of the upper 8 colors are something completely different
than your regular colorset (bright green works for me).  Every pixel that is
still in the uper eight will be readily apparant.  Change them all to the
color they are -supposed- to be and save the icon again.

Violá, la petite image!

Thanks:

A great big round of applause must go to Roger McVey for his original
thinking and design.  I love the icons, and even the README files inlcuded
were humorous and fun to read.

Also thanks must go to the OS devlopment crew at CBM.  Allowing us to use a
multi-hued Workbench was a bigger step than you might think.

Here's hoping for a better tommorow... seeya in September!

-Eric Penn
 GEnie: STUPID
 SysOp - The MACHINE BBS
         [phone]