============================================================================= More colors on the Worbench Screen (The sequel) 11/25/87 By David M. Pochron (aka: The MCP) ============================================================================= OVERVIEW: -------- Here it is! What I thought originally would imvolve complex routines to open and close the WorkBench screen with more bitplanes and such, only required minimal programming. The OS in the Amiga is so versatile, it took the changes with open arms. (er, almost, that is) Nevertheless, eight colors (or more) is possible on all Amigas now, with or without the KickStart in ROM. (That means you, Amiga 500 & 2000 owners!) The program ties into the screen structures and just appends a new bitplane on to it. That's it! The program can be executed at any time during the session, so you need not even alter the Startup-Sequence, (though that is the best time to activate the program) The programs included with this ARC file are all 100% assembly language so the code is quite small. (Besides, I love assembly language!) WHAT YOU GET WITH THIS ARC FILE: ------------------------------- ARCed Name: Should be named as: Description: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Planes BitPlanes Program that makes 8/16 color WB! Planes.info BitPlanes.info Icon for the above program Readme Readme This file (duh!) Readme.info Readme.info Nice 8 color project icon for the file Disk.info Disk.info 3 bitplane disk icon Trash.info Trashcan.info 3 bitplane trashcan icon CLI.info CLI.info Alternate icon for CLI. (3 bitplanes) Drawer.info Drawer.info 3 bitplane drawer icon Setcolor SetColor Program to set color registers 0-15 Savecolor SaveColor Program to save the colors currently being used on the WB screen Lauren.info Lauren.info *4* bitplane icon (the famous "Lauren" pic, courtesy of NewTek's Digi-View!) (with help from Butcher & Dpaint II!) USING THE BITPLANE PROGRAM: -------------------------- The BitPlanes program, which changes the number of bitplanes on the screen can be called from CLI or from Workbench. When using it from CLI, (the best place to use it) the format for the call is: BITPLANES [n] (where n is a value from 3 to 8) For now, the only real "legal" values you can use are 3 or 4. A three will give you 8 colors, and a four will give you a maximum of 16 colors. If you give no value, it defaults to 3 bitplanes. If you have already installed the extra bitplanes and run the program again, any value passed in is ignored and the screen is toggled back to 2 bitplanes again. (the normal WorkBench screen) If you run this program from WorkBench by clicking on its icon, you can get a 16 color WB screen by keeping the left mouse button pressed after you double-click the icon. The program isn't going to take too long to load so you had better be fast! If you only want 8 colors, just double-click the icon and make sure the left mouse button is not pressed while the program executes. Again, if you run this program again after more colors have been installed, it will toggle back to a 4 color WorkBench screen no matter whether you are keeping the button depressed or not. After the extra bitplanes are installed, it will probably be necessary to use the "Redraw" function under the Workbench "Special" menu, so all the icons are re-rendered in their full colors. Still, the best place to execute this program is at the beginning of a startup-sequence, since the WorkBench usually hasn't been loaded so all the menus and icons will come up rendered properly. Also, if you add bitplanes after a huge hunk of chip memory has been allocated by another program, and then that program deallocates that memory, the extra bitplanes will end up sitting like and island in the middle of chip memory. Not a good situation! One other note: this program works FINE with interlaced workbench screens! Finally, this program automatically sets the first 16 color registers to the values my icons included with this arc file need. If you want a different set of colors, use the Set&SaveColor programs (see below) or use a disk editor (like NewZap) and edit the RGB values. The data for these values is CLEARLY marked in the file as to where they begin, so changing the values should be no problem. Note that the color registers are set WHENEVER the program is run - even when it is toggling back to 2 bitplanes, so keep that in mind. An interesting side effect: If you have another screen open at the time this program is run, the bitplanes will be modified for THAT screen! Don't know yet if this could serve any useful purpose, but it is interesting! SETCOLOR AND SAVECOLOR ---------------------- These programs are similar to the Set & Save color programs included in the original KickStart mod, except they set all colors from 0 to 15. They still use the file "Color.palette" as the source & destination file. Since the BitPlanes program automatically sets the colors when it is run, these two files are actually not really necessary. I included them just in case you didn't have a disk editor to change the default colors in BitPlanes and you wanted your own set of colors. (You will need a program like PopColors, however, to set your own RGB values on the screen before saving them.) MAKING 8 & 16 COLOR ICONS: ------------------------- Obviously, you can't use the existing icon editor anymore if you want to create icons with more than four colors. Until someone writes an icon editor with a variable # of bitplanes, a utility to make IFF brushes into icons will usually do the trick. Some icon zappers (as they are called) won't create icons with more than 3 bitplanes, so depending on the icon zapper you have, you may be limited to just 8-color icons. To make Lauren an icon, I used DigiView 2.0 to convert her to a B&W image, then went to Dpaint II and removed the background. I then used Butcher to fit the image into the color registers I wanted and finally used an icon zapper written in BASIC from a recent Compute! magazine. (Which did convert 4 bitplane brushes to icons just fine.) CAVEAT EMPTOR: (or let the user beware!) ------------- Okay, as in the text that went with my previous KickStart mod, some icons don't work quite right when extra bitplanes are added. Also, backfill doesn't work with icons having more than 2 bitplanes. All 2 bitplane icons work fine with the mod, though animated ones won't show when they are dragged - add a bitplane to 'em and they'll work fine. Again, although the OS exhibits no real problems when more planes are added, if you run it from an icon, the menus may not get rendered properly the first few times they are used. Also, if a window is covering a CLI window when the program is run from an icon, garbage will appear in part of the CLI window that was covered. Drag & resize the CLI window to clear out this garbage. (If you run the program at the beginning of a startup-sequence, none of these rendering problems will occur, of course!) The biggest caveat is the fact that although the program will let you have 4 bitplanes on a WorkBench screen, the computer slows down to a speed that makes it almost unusable. Use 4 bitplanes only for demoing purposes. (ie: "wow" your Mac & ST friends by inserting a disk and having your digitized face come up as the disk icon!) Use 3 bitplanes for normal computer use. If you really need digitized icons during normal everyday use, consider setting the first 8 color registers to 8 shades of grey and then use dithering to get 16 shades. This should look even better than the Lauren icon, as it only uses *12* of 16 shades available on the Amiga. RULES: ----- Okay, this program is almost as "PD" as "PD" can get. You can hack at it all you like, include it in commercial software with no fees whatsoever, and pass it around as you like. (in fact, I encourage it!) The only thing I ask is you not change the credits & version info located within the BitPlane program itself. This text file you are reading does not need to be included with any commercial software the BitPlane program is used with. People uploading this ARC file to other BBSes, however, ought to leave this document intact, included with the other files. The icons, of course, are free for everyone to use - even Commodore-Amiga in their Amiga 3000! (grin) (PS: except Lauren - I don't know how NewTek would take to seeing their picture show up in someone else's commercial software!) FUTURE IMPROVEMENTS: ------------------- The first thing I'd like to do is to remove the "toggle back to 2 bitplanes" when run from CLI and instead have the user just enter the # of bitplanes they want on the screen - any number from 1-8! No hassle, no fuss. Also, I hope to have it check for a Color.palette file and load it if it finds one. That way, the user wouldn't have to use separate program to set his own preferences for the color registers. Other future enhancements may include a color palette editor built-in and a # of bitplanes requester for WorkBench users. If you have any suggestions (or, heaven forbid!) find a bug, you can reach me on CompuServe via _EMAIL_ (I don't get on too often, and messages on the Amigaforum scroll off so quickly!) at user # 72517,2102. Or, a much faster way is to call one of the following BBSes: S.A.R. BBS 305-266-6178 Leave message to "THE MCP *SYSOP*" -or- VikenHolm BBS 305-258-0862 Leave message to "THE MCP" (note: call here _ONLY_ between 5PM and 7AM EST) That's all for now! Enjoy having more colors on Workbench! Who knows...a HAM WorkBench might just be around the corner! - David M. Pochron