NewIcons: Do they mess up WB's colors?

[alkis21]

Upon installing NewIcons in Workbench 3.0, I noticed that although I am using the same palette (64 colors) as before the colors of my wallpapers now appear to be somewhat distorted. In fact, when I use the CopyNewIcon feature to add a new one, after rebooting the wallpapers appears to be slightly altered again. Why is this happening, and is there any way around it?

[alkis21]

These schreenshots should demonstrate what I mean:

Before:


After:

[thomas]

That's how it works. There is only a limited number of pens available. The application which reserves a pen first assigns a color to that pen. This color is locked to the pen until the application releases it.

The old icons don't care about colors. They just use the first four pens no matter which colors they have.

NewIcons in contrast tries to get the best colors for its icons and therefore does reserve pens. This means that less pens are left for the background image.

If you want to have a fixed palette you need to install FullPalette or a similar program which permanently locks all pens. But be warned, some programs need free pens to work. Those will no longer run if all pens are already locked.

[alkis21]

Thank you for explaining. That kind of sucks...

Any advice? I know I can't have both the full range of colors and the beautiful icons, but is there a way of making the best of it? I mean, all I can do at the moment is take a 256 colors image, convert it to 32 colors using Ppaint (where it looks great), load it into Workbench using Workbench Pattern and hope it doesn't look too distorted. Is there any chance I can have more control on the matter?

[daxb]

Originally Posted by thomas

But be warned, some programs need free pens to work. Those will no longer run if all pens are already locked.

Do you have an example for such a programm?

@alkis21:
As Thomas wrote you can use FullPalette for lock some/all pens.

[thomas]

With FullPalette you can configure for each pen whether with should be locked or not. So if you run your Workbench at 64 colors and your backdrop is 32 colors, you can lock 32 pens to the colors of your backdrop and leave the rest for NewIcons and other applications.

You might also try this:

Download Picasso96 from Aminet and unpack it to RAM. http://aminet.net/package/driver/video/Picasso96
Open the Classes/DataTypes directory of your boot drive and rename the file picture.datatype into picture.datatype.old. Then copy RAM:Picasso96Install/Classes/DataTypes/picture.datatype to that directory. Reboot to activate it.

This new picture.datatype will use a dither algorithm to render the backdrop into the screen. Might look better or worse. Try it and decide yourself. If you don't like it, just delete the new version and rename picture.datatype.old back to picture.datatype.

[alkis21]

Thank you Thomas, I tried the new picture.datatype but saw no difference.

I downloaded FullPalette and I'm currently experimenting with it, right now I'm very confused as to what I am supposed to do but I'll keep trying.

EDIT: Everything looks fine now, thank you again.