Chapter 8

Replacing the icons

Four choices. Take one. Method 2 is the one the script installs.

Why any of this

The Amiga 1200 was the last great Amiga Commodore made, and the desktop people built on it is the one worth having back: Kickstart 3.1, AGA, a hard disk, a graphics card for a screen bigger than the chipset could draw, MUI for modern windows, color icons, and WHDLoad so every game lives on the disk instead of in a box of floppies. An emulator or a MiSTer puts that machine back on your desk. Getting to that finished desktop is the work.

You cannot download it ready-made. Workbench and Kickstart still belong to someone, so the disks and the ROM have to be yours, and Commodore’s own installer has to copy them. Everything after that is a recipe of Proceed buttons, the Green Amiga Alien guide, which people have followed by hand for twenty years. These notes turn that recipe into scripts, so someone new to Amiga emulation gets the upgraded A1200 in an afternoon, from disks they own.

The end of the road is a build nobody babysits. AmiPilot can sit inside the running Amiga, click what is left of the installers, and take a picture of the screen, so an AI agent can check that the desktop came up, that the icons are in color, that a game launches, and fix the script when they are not. Every page here is one step toward that.

Color icons are the change you see first, and the guide offers four ways to get them. The guide contents list Magic Workbench, NewIcons with ClassAct, NewIcons without ClassAct, and the Iconographics pack. Those are choices. Iconographics is an 8-color set, and that page says ClassAct and Scalos stay unused for it. NewIcons is chapter 8 method 2, and ClassAct is what its prefs window needs. Installing every row does not produce a more colorful Workbench.

By hand
Method
Choose MagicWB, NewIcons with ClassAct, NewIcons without ClassAct, or Iconographics.
The choice is the same on the core. ClassAct is the previous chapter, and only the second method needs it. Take one set. Stacking them is how a snapshot becomes unrestorable, which is why the hardfile was copied aside.
Automated
Copy
Save the chosen archive into the Programs directory.
pack_directory_hdf.sh turns that folder into a slave hardfile, which is what the core mounts.
Eliminated
Launch
Reload WinUAE and start.
Eliminated. Boot the core.
Automated
Extract
Shell, lha, endcli, then run that method’s installer.
install_newicons.sh is method 2. It writes the High End library, DefIcons, and the 32-color pictures, and it saves RTG Mode and No Borders. Transparent stays off on this core: the drag picture is drawn with no pixels, so the icon vanishes until you let go. The guide ticks that box. A WHDLoad RomIcon, such as the State of the Art dragon, is a 16-color dither that reads as noise on this screen; NewIcons does not repaint it. The color picture is the installer’s .newicon, and build_mister_image.sh --romicon-newicons merges it into every game icon on the disk. MagicWB-style icons on pens 4–7 are a palette matter, covered in Eight pens.
By hand
Tidy
After the icons land, Clean Up and Snapshot the drawers that moved.
That is chapter 3, still by hand.

Step numbers follow Chapter 8, from the guide contents in the Green Amiga Alien guide. The words are ours.