Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: s_walter@irav1.ira.uka.de (Thomas Baetzler) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: MagicWB Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.misc Date: 7 Sep 1993 18:37:01 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 280 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <26ikcd$bsv@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: s_walter@irav1.ira.uka.de (Thomas Baetzler) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: Workbench, icons, background patterns, graphics, shareware PRODUCT NAME MagicWB [MODERATOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on September 9, 1993. Search for the text "[UPDATE:" to find updated information. -Dan] BRIEF DESCRIPTION A collection of icons to replace the standard Commodore-supplied icons. To quote from MagicWB's ReadMe file: "[This] is not 'just another useless Icon compilation!' It is far more different. [...] This package contains all standard system icons and more (actually 60 different icons) painted in a new completely different style: They look very 3-dimensional, have 8 colors, have gradient fills, feature click-and-push animation if being clicked onto to simulate a pushed button and even more..." AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Martin Huttenloher Address: Parkstr. 11 87645 Schwangau Germany Telephone: ++49 (0)8362-81104 E-mail: xen@nathan.zer.sub.org (Internet) XEN@NATHAN.ZER (Z-Netz) SHAREWARE FEE DM 20.00 or $20.00 (US) SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE If you don't have the AGA chipset, I strongly recommend a flicker fixer or some kind of graphics board that lets you use the Workbench in a flicker free HighRes-Interlaced or better display mode. While MagicWB can be installed on any kind of system, it doesn't look too good on displays with non-proportional pixels. For example, a 640x200 display would make the MagicWB icons look much too tall. To unpack the MagicWB archive, you'll need at least 1.7 megabytes of RAM or hard disk space. Installation might be difficult on floppy-based systems with less than 2 MB of memory and custom Workbench disks. SOFTWARE The MagicWB icons are created using the enhanced AmigaDOS 2.x coloring scheme, so you'll need at least Workbench 2.0. If you want to use one of the fancy backdrop patterns, you'll also need to pick up the "NickPrefs" package by Nicola Salmoria, which can be found on AmigaLibDisk (Fish Disk) 780. COPY PROTECTION None. However, all MagicWB icons are marked with a tooltype ">>>>>>Icon by Martin Hottenloher <<<<<<". MACHINE USED FOR TESTING My test setup includes: o Amiga 2000, ECS chipset, Kickstart 2.04, Workbench 2.1 o Commodore A2630 68030 accelerator with 4 MB of 32-bit memory o Commodore A2320 FlickerFixer o Picasso II Graphics Enhancer o CTX 14" MultiScan Monitor REVIEW I'll admit I had to be forced to try out the MagicWB package. I had been using the normal 4 color HighRes Workbench for ages, and I saw no need to change things around, especially not to some colorful interlaced mode. But then my Picasso II arrived, and peer pressure got the better of me. Now I'm perfectly happy with the new look of my Workbench, and I'm not thinking of switching back any more. The installation should prove no major problem once you've read the "LIKES AND DISLIKES" and "BUGS" sections of this review. Just go ahead and see what you get! Alternatively, you can have a look at Martin's Workbench by clicking on the "Show MagicWB" icon. Modifications include the switch to an interlaced display with eight colors. Also, all of the standard system icons will be replaced with their MagicWB counterparts. The supplied utility "Update Drawers" brings the new "Magic" look to directory structures on other partitions of your system. Once you're done, you will see the new professional look of your Workbench. MagicWB also comes with a large collection of nice-looking backdrops that can be installed on your Workbench. They sure do look nice, but if your Workbench version is lower than 3.0, you need NickPrefs to install them. See "BUGS" on my experiences with this package. You pay for all that glitz with some trade-offs: the MagicWB icons are quite a bit larger in size than the old ones, so they take up much more space on your hard disk. They also take longer to load, since the installation seems to fragment your hard disk a bit. However, this is quickly cured by backing up and restoring the disk, defragmenting it. Alternatively, if you're courageous enough, you might try one of those fancy disk reorganisation programs. Switching from 4 colors non-interlaced to 8 colors interlaced also carries some performance penalties on older systems, since the increased DMA bandwidth required to display such a mode effectively slows down blitter operation. If you wish you had your old fast-scrolling shell back, you might try Bernhard Moellemann's ScreenManager, which lets you open a dedicated public screen in your favourite screen resolution to run your shell(s) on. This shouldn't be a problem on AGA machines! Running MagicWB on the Picasso II graphics board in 800x600 pixel resolution is a pleasure to behold! :-) Another problem of running an interlaced display is the inevitable flicker in the first scan line of the display that my A2320 display enhancer creates. A cheap work-around to this is using the "BorderBlank" commodity which can be found in the subdirectory os20/util on the Aminet ftp sites. I remember having heard of some program that would blank the first line of the display to avoid that problem, but I seem unable to get a pointer to it. Any suggestions? [UPDATE: Several readers were quick to mention QMouse, which can be found on AmigaLibDisk (Fish Disk) 802 or on Aminet. Sadly, QMouse's NoFlicker patch didn't work properly on my Workbench. While the top line flicker persisted, the Workbench would go into "fireworks display mode" when it was dragged down. Also, there is a much neater solution, which was pointed out to me by Rene Petri: enter the Overscan preferences program to adjust the borders of your display so your screen starts below and not on the flickering line! In conjunction with BorderBlank, this small trick hides the annoying flicker perfectly. - Thomas] [MODERATOR'S NOTE: Some monitors allow the first line of the display to be raised high enough to be hidden by the monitor border itself. This is another way to solve the problem. I do this at home on my NEC 5fg. - Dan] You might also run into trouble trying to run your collection of hard-disk-installed games. Some commercial games evidently don't like interlaced Workbench displays! You can kludge around this by fixing them with a startup-procedure that explicitly switches back to a non-interlaced screenmode of your choice. The "ScreenMode" preferences program supplies a "Use" keyword that lets you specify a screenmode preferences file to use. Having all those old-style icons lying around on your Workbench tends to be a problem, too. Don't be afraid to try to create your own icons! All you need is IconEdit and some paint package! Maybe Martin Huttenloher will provide generic MagicWB icon layout templates in IFF format in a future release! DOCUMENTATION MagicWB comes with a large, 58 kilobyte ReadMe file, detailing the installation, history and concept of MagicWB. There's also a license agreement and the usual plea for shareware contributions. LIKES AND DISLIKES I don't like the way the MagicWB installation copies its new icons over the existing ones, overwriting your existing tooltypes, and without saving the old icons first. The installation should provide an option to back up the old icons someplace. A suitable method would be to "cd" to the SYS: partition and run something like 1> cd sys: 1> lha -r a old_icons #?.info which recursively collects all existing icon files into an archive. Now, if you want to restore your old icons after you have installed MagicWB, this is done easily by unpacking the archive again: 1> lha x old_icons Copying over the old tooltypes to the new icons is a bit more difficult. This should be handled in an updated version of the installation program. Maybe Martin Hutteloher could try out Stefan Winterstein's "ICONtrol", which can be found on AmigaLibDisk (Fish Disk) 603. This utility lets one replace the image of an existing icon with that from another icon. Giving away a fully operational shareware package shows the author's trust in the Amiga community. However, my personal feeling is that more people would be willing to register if the author made clear what kind of incentives he's offering. You know, I just love to have those shareware registration certificates and specially labeled disks around. :-) While MagicWB includes all of the standard icons, you'll probably discover that there are thousands of old-style icons left on your Workbench. :-( Converting all of them over to the new "Magic" look should prove too hard a task for any single user. In an effort to motivate other users to contribute their custom-made MagicWB icons to a common pool, I've uploaded the archive "MagicIcons.lha" to the directory wb/misc on the Aminet ftp sites. New icons include my favourite commodities like "Tool Manager", "TWA", "ASwarm", "MFR" and "Exploding Layers". COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS I've seen a lot of icon collections in my time, but there's nothing that comes close to MagicWB in quality. BUGS The "Unpack MagicWB" script didn't work properly for me. The dearchiver complained that it had problems creating some files. This is either fixed by unpacking the archive from hand, or by replacing the call of "lhx" in the script with a call of LhA. I experienced random crashes and gurus after installing a full MagicWB. At first I figured it might be a problem with my newly-acquired A2060, the the new release of the Picasso II software, or even a nasty virus. However, by chance I was pointed to the true culprit: > From: Tom Jones <1:147/2020.5@fidonet> > Date: 29 Aug 93 15:23:26 > Newsgroup: fidonet.AMIGA > Message-ID: 3e3af5da%FidoNet@p5.f2020.n147.z1.fidonet.org > Subject: Majic WB gotcha! > I just solved a problem someone else might find interesting to know > about. After installing [MagicWB] my editor started crashing the > whole system, usually guru 8000 0003, when I saved the message. (I first > noticed it using Textra 1.13a as the editor for April point software.) This > had not happened before, now it was every other message. > To cut to the chase, I found one thing that cured it: not using NickPrefs [...] > Tom I'm forwarding a bug report to Nicola Salmoria. [MODERATOR'S NOTE: I have seen many reports on USENET that NickPrefs may cause system crashes, especially under Kickstart 3.0. - Dan] [UPDATE: I've gotten a reply from Nicola Salmoria regarding NickPrefs. He states that he hasn't experienced or heard of problems with his WBPattern program. Since he has now upgraded to OS 3.0, he also can't test or debug NickPrefs, so that the only possible solution seems to be not to use the WBPattern Preferences. - Thomas] VENDOR SUPPORT Quoting Martin Huttenloher: "Registered users will receive one free update of MagicWB on a specially labeled disk. Further updates will be available for a nominal fee covering postage and handling; i.e., about DM 5 or $5 (US)." WARRANTY None. CONCLUSIONS MagicWB gives your Amiga Workbench that professional look that you've come to envy on systems like NeXT. You really should give it a try. I'd rate it 4.5 stars out of 5. COPYRIGHT NOTICE Copyright 1993 Thomas Baetzler. All rights reserved. You can contact me at: fhinf@iraul1.ira.uka.de (until October 1993) s_walter@irav1.ira.uka.de (send CC: to here please) Thomas.Baetzler@mil.ka.sub.org (slow but reliable) Medic BSS, 2:241/7454.2@fidonet (very slow but reliable) Thomas Baetzler, Herrenstr. 62, 76133 Karlsruhe, FRG Voice: ++49 (0)721 29872 Medic BBS: ++49 (0)721 496821 --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews