NewIcons

Revision as of 04:00, 28 December 2023

NewIcons (or NewIcon) is an icon file format associated with the NewIcons software for Amiga computers. NewIcons is a popular third-party utility that adds support for higher-quality icons.

The standard size for NewIcons images is 36×40 pixels, though other sizes are common. They can have up to about 255 colors. Unlike the original icon format, the colors are not determined by the user's chosen color scheme.

See Amiga Workbench icon for more information about Amiga icons.

Format

A NewIcons file is (more or less) a valid original format icon file. It contains an icon (or a pair of icons) in the old format, which will be displayed by applications that don't support NewIcons format. For some reason, in practice this icon is often a blank 5×5 8-color image.

Icon files can contain a table of strings called "ToolTypes". NewIcons abuses this data structure by storing the actual image data in it. Locating the ToolTypes table is nontrivial.

In a NewIcons file, one of the strings in the table (usually the first one) is a single space: " ". The next string is the message "*** DON'T EDIT THE FOLLOWING LINES!! ***". Later strings contain the NewIcons data, which includes the image dimensions, and the palette and pixel data.

Identification

As with all the Amiga Workbench icon formats, files begin with bytes 0xE3 0x10.

The ASCII string "*** DON'T EDIT THE FOLLOWING LINES!! ***" appears somewhere in the file.

Make sure the file is not actually in GlowIcons format.

Specifications

• http://www.evillabs.net/wiki/index.php/Amiga_Icon_Formats

Software

• Konvertor
• NewIcons46.lha: The NewIcons software
• XnView - Supports some but not all NewIcons files
• Deark

Sample files

• Some of the icons at http://aminet.net/pix/icon
• http://cd.textfiles.com/zoom2/graphics/icon_related/newiconsv2/icons/
• dexvert samples — image/newIcon

Links

• Wikipedia article