Amiga Workbench vs Cracktro
アミガ・ワークベンチ / クラックトロ
Amiga Workbench comes from Platform Screen Languages and Cracktro from Digital Art. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Amiga Workbench
The screen language Commodore set down for the Amiga in its own style guide. Early Workbench works in four colors, blue with white and orange, and packs Topaz, a blocky bitmap face, into a 640 by 200 grid. Its signature move is that the screen itself is a layer, so grabbing the bar at the top and dragging it down reveals another screen running behind it with its own palette and resolution.
Cracktro
A short screen bolted to the front of cracked software as a group's calling card. An oversized group name, text scrolling without end and a run of greetings turned the home computer display into a stage.
| Amiga Workbench | Cracktro | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1985–1996 | 1980s-1990s |
| Family | Platform Screen Languages | Digital Art |
| Kind | Style | Style |
| Cues | A screen that uses four colors and no more, which are blue, white, orange and black / A blocky bitmap face packed into a coarse 640 by 200 grid / A full width title bar running across the top of the screen, with depth gadgets at its right end / Live controls raised by a light line at the top left and a dark line at the bottom right, inverting to a sunken state when pressed | Text scrolling endlessly across the screen / Bands of color running behind it / An oversized group name held at the center / A run of greetings naming other groups |
| Best used for | Rebuilding a 1980s home computer screen as the third lineage, neither Macintosh nor Windows · Working under a four color limit where press and disabled states have to be carried by inverted light and dark rather than by hue | Bolting a short screen to the front of something being passed around, to give the group's name · Packing a burst of sound and image into an executable with a small size budget |
| Type | Set a monospaced bitmap face at its native size with no scaling and no smoothing. Fix the cap height around eight pixels and keep the leading tight. | Monospaced bitmap letters running the greetings along the bottom without a break |
| Composition | One full width title bar runs across the top of the screen and windows fill the space below. Windows may overlap freely, but screens never do, since they slide vertically as whole layers. | Hold the oversized group name at the centre and keep the effect moving around it |
| Material | Fix the four color set before anything else. Build depth from a one pixel light line and a one pixel dark line rather than a gradient, keep the light source at the top left, and swap the two lines for the pressed state. | Patterns generated from formulas and a short looping tune, built with no asset files |
| Caution | Adding colors past the four breaks the very mechanism that carried press and disabled states, because those were read as contrast in brightness, and the controls become indistinguishable on a monochrome or grayscale display. | Line up the effects but drop the name and the run of greetings, and the calling card is gone, leaving only a short piece of animation. |