Making WB Backgrounds - What res do you use?

[Mixel]

I'm making a pack of desktop backgrounds for classic Amigas, and I'm trying to decide which resolutions I should include.. They're all 4 colour pics using the first 4 workbench colours (in wb3, I'm not sure what happens when you use them in earlier workbenches?)

Is there some sort of better desktop background manager than the one included in AmigaOS? It's very old-school having to make so many different versions, but thinking about it - if it scaled them they'd look nasty at these low resolutions anyway, so it seems like I have to cover the resolution bases individually.. But it hadn't occurred to me quite how MANY resolutions AmigaOS runs at.. I have no idea what people use most commonly?

The obvious things I think I need;

PAL High res Laced full overscan: 722x566 (a beautiful thing, if only I had a flicker fixer, boooo.)
PAL High res Laced No overscan:(*) 640x512
PAL High res full overscan.. 724x283 .. (this almost sounds.. useful?)
PAL High res no overscan..(*) 640x256
Multiscan Productivity: 640x480
NTSC High Res Laced: 640x400 (why doesn't NTSC get overscan? On my amiga at least..? weird!)
NTSC High Res: 640x200

* - Does anyone not use overscan when it's available? Is it a CRT limitation thing that would stop you? I haven't used a CRT in so many years I really don't remember.

The highGFX and hd720 ones, does anyone actually use those? They're so drastically different to the other resolutions I'm not sure I should accommodate them?

Thanks again!

[BatteMan]

I need to take a look at my A1200 with Indivision but I think it must be in 640*480 to be compatible with TFT's resolution.

Thx for your future pack, I like your style !

[Mixel]

I need to take a look at my A1200 with Indivision but I think it must be in 640*480 to be compatible with TFT's resolution.

Thx for your future pack, I like your style !

Ah! Thank you batteman!

That’s good and the easiest resolution for me to support really.

Envious of your Indivision! Frustratingly I can get multiscan: productivity in 480p but not through my scart cable to the OSSC, just via a vga in.. The OSSC deals with vga-in differently to how it does scart so it renders some motion pretty horribly. I kind of have to swap between video cables depending on whether I want to use high resolution and low resolution modes. Hopefully a new scart cable fixes it. I can’t be doing with the flickery interlace, it’s painful!

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Ed: The conversion between different resolutions and pixel ratios is a lot more work and simply scaling them.. what looks good in 640x480 doesn’t directly work well once squished to 640x240 - interestingly some styles of dithering look great in non-square pixel modes, so I’m actually shading the lower resolution ones more as it counteracts some of the aliasing you can’t avoid when your pixels are crazy shapes!

All this messing around in high-res is kind of making me want to make my own, very compact icon set?!

I wish I understood how icon palettes worked, if I modify a 3.1.4 glowicon in iconian and save it out, some of the colours in its palette always seem to unlock and the icon has multicoloured changing parts. Argh.

[Mixel]

Finding new and exciting ways to procrastinate.

Cutest boing ball ever.

[Mixel]

Here's what I meant about dithering looking better in weird shaped pixels.. Somehow the mind doesn't seem to register half width pixels in the same way so you can do some nice blending that'd look outright ugly on 1x1.. These are taking me so long in part as I keep switching between different projects, lol. I'm being productive, just on 15 things at once so it's very slowwww progress.

[Zippy Zapp]

That's awesome. Great technique.