FixMWB 0.xa ----------- 'FixMWB' remains © Stephen Brookes 1997, but may be freely distributed. Ho Hum ------ You use this software at your own risk! I will accept no responsibility for any unwelcome effects resulting from the use of any software or information in this archive. So there. Requirements ------------ Hmmm... Not too sure about that. This has only been tested on V39/40, and may or may not fail on 3) to 3bit, and 3bit to 8bit. This is probably more widely usefull behaviour. Well... Hmmm... MWB icons were a problem. They are 8colour icons, usually 3bits deep. This means that they use the first 8 colours of your wb palette. Unfortunately, when the wb palette is running in 8 colour mode, it uses the first four, and the last four colours, so the icons will only look correct on an 8 colour screen. However, if the icons are 8bits deep, they too will use the first+last four pens, and look correct on any screen. This is old news (and fixmwb is an old programme), nowadays there are 'palette daemons' that will force the palette to set up the first eight colours correctly for 3bit MWB icons on any screen depth. So much for history. Now there are 3bit MWB icons, and 8bit ones, and even some inbetween depths. If you want to avoid messed up icons, you have to set both the second and the last four colours of your palette to MWB colours, which is a waste of pens. To avoid this, you either need all your MWB icons to be 3bit, or 8bit, then you can have just the first or the last four pens set for MWB. If you use a palette daemon, 3bit is better since they are naturally smaller and faster. I choose not to use a daemon, so I go for 8bit. You can of course convert an icons depth with an icon editor, or some graphics programme, but I can't be bothered with that anymore, so FixMWB will do it automatically... Drop those horrible messed up MWB icons onto the appicon. With any luck they will come out looking normal. Note that you must not be running 'NewIcons' at the same time (disable it in the Exchange), or you may only fix a copy of the icon. If the icons you drop (of course you can shift/select many icons at once) are >3bits deep, they will be converted to 3bit. If they are 3bit, they will be converted to 8bit. This means that, if you are after 8bit icons, you may have to drop them twice, if you find any 4-7bit icons, but these are not common. (see 'operation' for more detail) You are strongly advised NOT to drop other (non mwb) icons onto fixmwb! (see 'operation') FixMWB's appicon uses the second four pens on the left, and the last four pens on the right (hopefully), which should give some indication how your palette is currently set up... Note that 8bit icons are bigger than 3bit icons :) The upshot of this is that they use more disk space (and memory), and changing from one to the other is likely to cause some fragmentation of your drive! Operation --------- Icons less than 3bits deep are ignored. 3bit icons are converted to 8bit, with plane 2 being echoed through planes 3-7 For all deeper icons, planes 2-n are scanned and if these planes contain only one pattern, or one pattern and null planes, the pattern will be copied to plane 2, and the icons depth reduced to 3bit. Icons which do not have all their planes selected in PlanePick will be ignored. Any trailing bits in the image will be cleared. You can probably guess that dropping non-mwb icons into fixmwb is likely to really mess up your icons! Bugs ---- Certain icons eg. those associated with un-openable drawers will cause fixmwb to instantly close down! I think this is 100% safe. WB passes no args for these icons, which is interpreted as a double-click on the appicon, hence fixmwb shuts down. (because of this, a 'quit' requester was added) Future ------ No future. (unless someone tells me how to get arround NewIcons, or stop the erroneous shut-down problem) Past ---- v0.4a ----- - operation changed, 4-8bit now convert to 3, and 3 converts to 8bit. Thanks tooooo..... ------------------ Misha Malyshev (requesting n->3bit support) Send feedback to... Stephen Brookes Note: I currently have no valid Fido address!