Workbench 3.1 icons

[jams0988]

kiddy-anime thing that swept over here in the late 90's likely due to things like Pokémon and the internet in general and just seeing elements of it merged here into the Amiga's look is a bit of a turn-off for me. 

"All the animation from an entire country is for little kiddies! Seeing any influence of Japanese art puts me off!" Come on, Carnivac! Give the magical girls and super powered teens of the world another chance! They'll grow on you, bro! (ノ＞▽＜。)ノ
Or just go watch Ghost in the Shell or Samurai X or something. You're an artist, so you'll probably appreciate them. Watch them in Japanese, so the god-awful dubs your country's distributor supplied doesn't make you want to throw up and/or punch someone. Then you'll be able to enjoy Arne's new set to the fullest!

Actually, I've been pushing that manga feature further :3  I've got an 80's Manga fetish, so... And I sort of despise the "euro-wacky-face" cartoon style used here back then (e.g. Hugo, Magic Pockets, Stunt Car racer).

Hear, hear. Push the cat faces. I love them! The icon set is really great looking overall though, I think. It's so easy on the eyes.
Looking forward to the rest of the set, though I haven't used an amiga in....twenty years?:'D

[Carnivac]

   

    "All the animation from an entire country is for little kiddies! Seeing any influence of Japanese art puts me off!" Come on, Carnivac! Give the magical girls and super powered teens of the world another chance! They'll grow on you, bro! (?>?<?)?
    Or just go watch Ghost in the Shell or Samurai X or something. You're an artist, so you'll probably appreciate them.

     
    Ok.  So very, very wrong.
     
    I was actually a HUGE fan of anime in the early to mid 90's and still consider such films as Akira, Ninja Scroll, Ghost in the Shell and Wings of Honneamise to be big favourites of mine.   Back when anime (at least here in the UK) was seen as quite underground and definitely NOT for kids (it had the reputation of being animated porn thanks to over the top demon rape stuff like Urotsukidoji... not one I should not have purchased, looking back, now).   I had every issue of the UK magazine Manga Mania which reprinted various stories such as Akira (which took about half of each issue for most of it's publication history cos it was so huge), Dominon: Tank Police, Ghost in the Shell, Appleseed and others plus various trade paperback versions I still own including 3x3 Eyes, Lupin III, Ranma 1/2, Dirty Pair, Bubblegum Crisis, Devilman (I had almost all of the fewture Devilman figures during the latter part of the 2000's).  Then when the whole Pokémon thing kicked off it's like the perception of anime went completely the other way and everyone started assuming it was all for kids.   Suddenly I was getting ridiculed for supposedly liking all this awful crap I had no interest in such as that and (the worst anime I've ever seen) Dragonball Z.  My sole birthday present one year (other than cash) was a frickin' 'talking' Pikachu plushie... ugh...  Hated the damn thing.  Ended up giving it to a children's hospital charity thing (rather than setting it on fire as had been my original plan).
     
    I've tried various anime series since then though the only ones that have appealed to me have been Cowboy Bebop (largely helped by a great soundtrack by Yoko Kanno who also did the Macross Plus music of which I own the CD's for) and I admire the Miyazaki movies (in that something like Spirited Away or My Neighbour Totoro can be charming and family friendly in an imaginative way and not a merchandise-driven gimmicky badly-animated way like many others) though my favourite work of his is still the classic Lupin III movie The Castle of Cagliostro.  However there are certain anime-stylistic choices, mostly in action series (even of companies I respect the work of if not always enjoy such as Madhouse), either irritate me or just seem unintentionally ridiculous when used in supposedly serious stories. 
     
   

    Watch them in Japanese, so the god-awful dubs your country's distributor supplied doesn't make you want to throw up and/or punch someone.

     
    Sorry, I know I may get hated by 'purists' but I just can't stand japanese voice acting...  It has always given me headaches or made me grit my teeth like the sound of nails on a chalkboard.  Besides, having to watch subtitles makes it harder to appreciate and study the animation in anime that I do like.  While there are some truly awful dubs for sure I actually do like a lot of the better done dubbed voice acting.  And in some I actually far, faaaar prefer the US replaced soundtrack (particularly the heavy rock and metal choices for Cyber City Oedo 808 and Street Fighter II, the latter of which pretty much made the KMFDM song 'Ultra' my absolute fave tune ever for kicking peoples faces in... in video games I mean... honest   )
     
   

    Then you'll be able to enjoy Arne's new set to the fullest!

     
    Yeah if it was anime-inspired of the ol' 'cyberpunk' type maybe.  Not the pocket monster variety.   Anyways as I said I do like the actual icons themselves and the pixelling.  Just could do with a lot less of the cutesy stuff.
     
    Ok I'm done. Sorry Arne for the somewhat longer than necessary post.  Just had to make it clear to that person that I have actually seen a LOT of anime and I definitely have a preference for the old school stuff.  Some of which did make it onto the Amiga in some ways.

Keep up the great pixelling.

[Arne]

The Japanese had their MSX, PC88/98 and PCEngine I guess. I didn't see a much manga stuff for the Amiga. Maybe some pseudo-manga. Even less for Pinball though. I've never seen a table with manga art on it, save for perhaps a few virtual ones.

Cutesy manga stuff can be for adults though. And not in the brony way. I shouldn't have to list anything, but I'm going to say that I enjoyed Dai Mahou Touge immensely.

Anyways, I backed up most of the floppies with projects on them. 8 years of work amounted to 32MB... though the HDD that died had 60 or so (probably a lot less since it had installed software). My new HDD is 40GB but I randomly partitioned only 440MB. I had lots of dupes and versions so now begins the sorting and merging.

I did more than I thought in the game above. I was able to move around, roll dice against monsters (with permanent corpses), and... die horribly, apparently. It's loosely based on a board game where you build the maze with tiles.



But not before taking two skeletons with me to the grave! Note kill count and body damage.



Source is horrible, but surprisingly compact as everything is retain mode. Gosubs galore! Apparently I didn't use switches or even if-else.

Also found one of my better games, Alien Invasion aka Blob Attack. Kept it simple with 4 colors (+1 Sprite cursor). Took 2 days to make. It comes with a level editor and boots off a floppy. I posted art for a remake of this game here a few years ago... for the 16 palette project I think.

[PypeBros]

Look like I'd have loved to program in AMOS if I had an Amiga back then

[Arne]

AMOS is pretty snazzy as long as you let your programs grow organically with you adjusting your ideas to what's feasible. If you start by having grand plans you'll quickly find yourself bogged down in... optimization galore and finding solutions around hardware limitations. V1.34 or possibly later is almost easier to use than Pro as a beginner. Less buttons more BASIC.

(Edit: Amiga Format 42 has v1.34 free. Boots off the ADF. The menu array at the top can be toggled with rmb and alt and stuff. Best to learn off examples. I could not make the installer work since I didn't set up a Data disk of some sort. AMOS was made freeware or something quite some time ago. Manual)

I just noticed that the WinUAE site has an utility called "adfread 1.1". The Amiga could write 720kB MSDOS disks using crossDOS but the PC floppy drives couldn't read Amiga disks due to hardware differences iirc. Apparently someone discovered a way around it

(Edit: reading the requirements for adfread makes me thing most people still won't be able to do it). There's always KryoFlux, but it's expensive.)

[PypeBros]

commodore computers typically had sectors decoding happening on the CPU ... while on IBM computers, that was delegated to the disk controller, and thus beyond software access.

[Arne]

Most probably made in '92. One of those... gotta draw dragon-snake with cool hair and teeth! Mouth more open! Not sure if that happened because I was a kid, or because it was a sort of "scene" thing to do (crazy cool creatures screaming at the void).


BattleField 92? Nah, probably made a few years later. It's a two player combat tactics game where each side have 2 different unit types out of 4 in total. Heavier units have explosive area weapons, lighter ones (o) fire bullets, but there's some variation in Action Point use, Armour, Accuracy, Range, Damage, HP. Movement and shooting is analog (mouse-guided). Graphics were some kinda placeholder. I think I did some pin-up art for the units but can't find the image. It was little light bulb men.

[Arne]

Been programming AMOS Pro for 2 days straight. It's a constant wrestling match with unforeseen hurdles. Had to come up with so many weird hacks because AMOS lacks certain advanced functions.

Started off yesterday by writing a file structure traversal tool which also loads file headers/data and tries to identify files. It can only do a few of the more common file types so far. The goal is to have it traverse my backup folder (drawer) and clean it up. Back then I often didn't use extensions... and when I did, they were nonsense like .b for "bana" (level). Hopefully my program will be able to apply icons which also contain data on how to open the various files (ed for text, DPIV or MultiView for .iff, something for sound/tracker modules).

Today I took a look at the icon format and realized that I could, after reading the header to set up dimensions, "just" Deek and Doke the icon bitplanes directly onto matching screen bitplanes. That gave me a few Guru Meditations, but it was great fun to get more privy with the hardware. Oddly enough, the 8 color icons contain 8 bitplanes, wasting 5, probably slowing down load times (maybe it's bcuz I copy-pasted from DP5 AGA which insists on 256 colors for some reason). I'll hack it down to 3.

Lastly I  wrote a thumbnailer which loads an .IFF and scales it down 8 times. This could have easily been done using a built in Zoom function, but I took the difficult route and did some AA sampling for the downscaling. Also, since the palette is different, it needs to be converted to my WB one. I did a 24bit RGB structure for that, but decided to convert it to HSV space since it gives better color matching imo (using a hypotenuse through color space with different weights for HSV). On top of this is a ditherer which uses the second closest color match if it's close enough.

Yeah, it doesn't look like much when truncated into my tiny 8 color palette. I can use 16 colors if I want to, but I enjoy the 8 color challenge more.

[hexaae]

The most beautiful WB 8 color icons I've ever seen in my entire life as a loyal 30 years Amiga user.
Would be great an Icon pack on Aminet...

P.S.
With PPaint (free on Aminet) you can directly load iff files and save them as icons...