Magic Workbench - is it worth it?
 

I want to enhance the way my Workbench looks and works, but I have some questions.

-Will MagicWB slow down my Amiga considerably? I have an A1200, 10MB RAM.
-Will it look ok on a 640x400 resolution?
-Is it easy to uninstall it if I don't like what I see?

I tried this on an even lower ECS resolution with 12 megs of ram and an 030/33...it slowed it down to a miserable level for me. Not only that, those stupid help windows were always popping up and getting in the way, it looked all goofy and XP-ish...and I didn't even find it functional at all. I felt like my system was all at once coded in AmigaBASIC (well...a cross between ABasic and AMOS). I prefer my Amiga smooth and respectable rather than tacky and sluggish. I already have that (Windows).

Magic Workbench is just a new set of icons. I used to have it on my 020/2mb machine and haven't experienced any slowdowns It needs 8 (16?) colors so it'll get as slow as a normal workbench screen with that amount of colors. While MWB icons are not perfect, they are better than default ones.

Twist, maybe you're speaking of MUI? I remember no help windows with MagicWB.

Hmmm...it has been awhile. I think you might be right. I remember trying both at the same time and hating one but not the other. I guess my mixing the two up is the only thing that makes sense. I stand corrected. :)

You probs have mixed them as MUI and MWB use the same colour standard :)

NewIcons are worse for slowing your system down

Quite ironically though as it states that NewIcons could even end up speeding up your system.

NewIcons does have the large advantage of different colors where MWB uses a simple color scheme.

I think nIcons speeds up the sys but MUI surely is a HOG and a common GURU causer IMO.

Bloat :(

nIcons might speed up some systems but it surely hogs resources on other systems. My A1200 was crawling along slower than a 133 mhz PC with windows XP.

Newicons require 64 (32?) colors and your system is doomed to slow down. Also default newicons are not pretty, installing it on a system with gfx card and replacing default newicons with replacements from aminet may be a good idea but again, installing os3.9 and glowicons is a better idea!

I had nIcons running in 16 color mode at the time. Never figured out a way to replace the default icons though. And with it requirering programs to be installed first which means in the end it takes up half the memory and a bit of a stock A1200 I decided to reinstall soon after.

MWB shure looks nice on a proportional screen. But for TV resolution stick with original C= icons, they might not be fancy but at least the harddrive icons look good ;)

I actually ran original C= icons and Birdie on my A1200 with 030/50 in 256 colors. It was not that slow really :) And it looked really great for the time.

Drake, newicons installs "copynewicon" in the prefs dir. With this you can copy the info files of the newicon compatible inons that you download from aminet over the default icon .info files. I don't like copynewicon for you are required to handle this operation with a file requester so I started this thread. Copyicon is especially good.

I like the way a plain, newly installed system works. Menus are lighning speed, icons too. Speaking of functionality, my 030/50 displays default icons faster than my PPC/Bvision machine that displays glow/new icons.

None... No color requirenments for the NI patch to run :D

I like the default set that comes with OS 3.9

Before that, I liked MagicWB because it was fast (newicons really dogs the system down) and it looked fairly decent. Although not as nice as what AGA is capable of, or what you can get with a gfx card, on lower end miggy's it's quite nice.

I mean newicons don't look good with anything under 32 colors, no?

Just install one of Bloodwych's Classic Workbenches - They are excellent.