Classic WB 68K in 16 colors for A500?

[oissery77]

Hi all ,

First of all, thanks for Bloodwych for his awesome work ! Cwb is excellent. I have a A500 with 1Mb chip/ 8Mb fast and Cwb 68k its working flawlessly in 8 colors and pal hires 640*256.
If i switch to 16 colors i have bad icons colors so i've tested with success the installation of fullpalette to have 16 colors on winuae. Before doing it on the real hardware i wanted to have your advices :
My 500 will be really impacted/slowed in terms of performance ? I use it to play whdload games.
Thanks!!

Regards
Cedric

[ReadOnlyCat]

Originally Posted by oissery77

First of all, thanks for Bloodwych for his awesome work ! Cwb is excellent. I have a A500 with 1Mb chip/ 8Mb fast and Cwb 68k its working flawlessly in 8 colors and pal hires 640*256.
If i switch to 16 colors i have bad icons colors so i've tested with success the installation of fullpalette to have 16 colors on winuae. Before doing it on the real hardware i wanted to have your advices :
My 500 will be really impacted/slowed in terms of performance ? I use it to play whdload games.

This will reduce drawing speed on the workbench (*) because there are twice as many bitplanes to draw but there will be no influence at all on games because they will use their own screen configuration or simply take over the system and use whichever hardware setup is faster.

Note that in regular system friendly operation, if there is a 4 color lores screen in front of the WB's hires/16c then the drawing speed of the foreground screen will be as if the WB screen did not exist as long as it is not made visible by scrolling down the lores one.

(*) this will however not slow non graphics tasks because you have Fast RAM so most of your programs will run at full speed in fast RAM and will not be slowed down by the 16 colors graphics.

[thomas]

This will reduce drawing speed on the workbench (*) because there are twice as many bitplanes to draw

There is only *one* more bitplane.

That's what all that bitplane stuff is about: you get twice as many colors by adding only one bitplane.

[oissery77]

Thanks ReadOnlyCat and thomas.
I just want to have a wallpaper in 16 colors so i understand that it will not influence the whdload games, i will just lost a little of chip ram (in winuae with a wallpaper i have 860Kb of chipram and in comparaison 920kb without it).

[ReadOnlyCat]

Originally Posted by thomas

There is only *one* more bitplane.

That's what all that bitplane stuff is about: you get twice as many colors by adding only one bitplane.

Shows you how long it is since I last knew the proper number of colors on the default workbench screen. I was pretty sure it had only four but after reading your answer the number 8 popped magically in my head.

[thomas]

Four colors (two bitplanes) is right as standard.

But to get more eye candy you need more colors. MagicWB for example needs at least 8 colors (three bitplanes).

[oissery77]

hi guys!
I've tested the 16 colors on the real hardware and it doesn't affect the performance, i've just lost about 100Kb of chipram. My games are working great

I've just noticed a weird thing about my "fairlight" wallpaper:
Some colors like the pink / blue colors are not showed.
The source file is a jpeg file and i've converted it to IFF in ppaint to my resolution pal hires 640x256x16 colors, screenshot in attachment.
I've installed fullpalette and copied the fullpallette.prefs in the prefs/presets folder. Here is a screenshot of the wallpaper in attachment.

any idea?
Thanks!

[thomas]

Probably Fullpalette is counterproductive in this case. It occupies pens and dictates colors. There is no chance for the datatype system to set other colors. You should either adjust the colors in Fullpalette to better match your image or remove Fullpalette altogether.

[Retrofan]

You've got to read some old posts Cammy wrote, as she isn't so active these days.

This for example:

http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=53736

Or this quote:

AmigaOS uses a system called Datatypes, which it uses to load image, sound, music, text, video, animation or anything else a datatype is written for. Once a datatype is written for a particular file format, any Amiga program that uses the datatypes system will be able to load it then. The most common picture formats are JPEG, PNG, and GIF. You can get datatypes for all of these for AmigaOS, so you will be able to use any of these file formats with WBPattern (In the Workbench:Preferences/ drawer). Workbench has datatypes for the ILBM/IFF format already too, which is the common Amiga picture format used in Deluxe Paint.

Setting up your Workbench requires some consideration first. Do you want it to look pretty, but be too slow to use, would you like it to look old and boring, but run super fast, or would you like something in-between, looking acceptable and working well?

Personally, I would recommend running Workbench in 16 colours, no more, no less, on an A1200. If you start increasing the colours, not only will you be using a lot more ChipRAM, but the refresh time will be slower. Workbench will look better if you have it set in at least 640x400, but it can flicker if you use an interlaced screenmode. This can be reduced with the tool MagicTV, or eliminated by using a VGA adapter and VGA-Only/Multiscan modes, by using a flicker fixer like the Indivision AGA, or by using an S-Video or Scart adapter and an LCD TV with a built-in flickerfixer (many have these, even though they aren't listed as a feature).

Download and install FullPalette. This will allow you to lock all 16 colours so they're always the same, so you can remap your images in advance to save time remapping them every time Workbench loads.

Download and load this palette into FullPalette (once it's installed) and save it!

Note your screen resolution. Let's just say it's 640x480. We would then go on the web and find some cute anime girl wallpapers. There are millions of them out there so it shouldn't be hard to find the one you want with Google Images. Save the image and load it into an image processing program, then scale it down to 640x480 (or whatever your Amiga's resolution is). Save the image as a PNG.

Now you need to remap the image to your Workbench's new locked 16 colour palette! To do this, you could use Personal Paint. First, open PPaint, then change the screen mode to Low Res 16 colours, no overscan. Then go to the colour menu and grab the Workbench's palette. You should see the palette of the screen change to the one used by Workbench now, which are several shades of grey, two blues, two greens, red, pink, brown, copper, yellow and orange. Now go to the Brush menu and load the new anime girl PNG file you saved. After a little while, it should load and remap the image, but it will still look all weird. What it has done is remapped the image from 24bit to 8bit. Now you need to complete the process by remapping it from 8bit to 4bit, your current screendepth. Personal Paint has two dithering methods to choose from when you remap images, but sometimes (in the case of cartoony images at least) they can look better without dithering. It's best just to try each option for each image and choose the best results. Usually Floyd Steinberg looks best. Once you have dithered your image to your 16 colour palette, save it as a ILBM/IFF image anywhere on your hard drive (make a Patterns drawer if you want to), then close Personal Paint.

Load up WBPattern, select the new image, test it, and save it.

You don't have to use Personal Paint, there are other image processing programs that can do the same thing, remapping an image to a set palette (like Image Studio). It also helps to have extra RAM when doing all of this stuff! And if you do have FastRAM and a 020 or better processor, download and install FBlit and FText so that your images and fonts won't take up precious ChipRAM.

But you better read this compilation Mfilos made:
http://www.mfilos.com/2012/01/guide-...ier-using.html

[oissery77]

Thanks Thomas and Retrofan for your return.

With the help of cammy's tutorial i succed to have the good colors thanks to her . The result is close to the original picture, the colors are a little degraded but it's really better than before.
Issue solved!
Here are some screenshots
Bye!