Amiga Workbench icon

Amiga Workbench icon is a family of unnecessarily-complicated icon formats used on Amiga computers.

This article describes the original format (sometimes called "Old Style icon", or something to that effect). For information specific to the newer formats, refer to NewIcons and GlowIcons.

An icon file is typically located alongside the file to which it is associated. For example, a file named  would be associated with the file named.

Most files contain a second image, to be displayed when the icon is selected.

Color format
Icons in the original format usually have 4 colors. The actual colors displayed depend on the user's Workbench palette.

The number of colors can apparently be any power of 2, but this is of limited usefulness, because no palette is stored in the file. Some variant formats do use more than 4 colors.

8-color icons often use the palette from the third-party MagicWB software.

Identification
Files begin with bytes. But make sure the file is not actually in NewIcons or GlowIcons format, which have the same signature.

Specifications

 * http://www.evillabs.net/wiki/index.php/Amiga_Icon_Formats
 * http://krashan.ppa.pl/articles/amigaicons/

Software

 * Konvertor
 * Netpbm: infotopam
 * XnView
 * RECOIL
 * abydos
 * abydos

Sample files

 * http://aminet.net/pix/icon - has icons in various formats
 * http://zapatopi.net/icon/ - in the .lha files
 * cd.textfiles.com - the Amiga CDs have lots of .info files
 * https://telparia.com/fileFormatSamples/image/info/

Links

 * Workbench (AmigaOS)
 * MagicWB
 * http://gega.homelinux.net/AmigaDevDocs/lib_14.html
 * AmigaOS Documentation Wiki: Icon Library
 * Ralf Steines' (unreleased) infotoppm - manpage may have useful information