A comprehensive representation of an Amiga Workbench icon file.
Details
Files, directories and other similar objects were depicted as icons on the Amiga Workbench (the Amiga's equivalent of what is now mostly known as the computer's desktop). Icons were actually separate files with the exact same name as the file or directory it represents, except for an additional `.info' extension.
In addition of being a graphical representation of files or directories, icon files also contained additional information about the file. It could for instance indicate which tool would be required to open the file.
The classic Amiga Workbench icon file has a rather complex structure as it is basically a dump of how it is stored in memory. As a result it contains many memory pointers that are really not necassary to store in a file.
The S3 AmigaIcon class is used to represent these complex files as a named
list. The elements in that list have mostly identical
names as listed in the document at the top referenced below. The names are usually
self-explanatory, but the referred documents can also be
consulted to obtain more detailed information with respect to each of
these elements. As pointed out earlier, not all elements will have a meaningful
use.
It is possible to change the values of the list, but not all values may be valid.
Note that they will not be fully checked for validity. Invalid values may result in errors
when writing to a binary file using write.AmigaIcon(), or may simply not
work properly on an Amiga or in an emulator.
The original `.info' file could be extended with NewIcon or with an OS3.5
IFFChunk() data, that allowed for icons with larger colour depths.
These extensions are currently not implemented.
Use simpleAmigaIcon() for creating a simple AmigaIcon object which can
be modified. Use read.AmigaIcon() to read, and write.AmigaIcon()
to write workbench icon files (*.info). With rawToAmigaIcon() and
as.raw() AmigaIcon can be coerced back and forth from
and to its raw (binary) form.
References
http://www.evillabs.net/index.php/Amiga_Icon_Formats http://fileformats.archiveteam.org/wiki/Amiga_Workbench_icon http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Libraries_Manual_guide/node0241.html http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Includes_and_Autodocs_3._guide/node05D6.html
See also
Other AmigaIcon.operations:
rawToAmigaIcon(),
read.AmigaIcon(),
simpleAmigaIcon(),
write.AmigaIcon()