Making OS 3.9 look more like OS 4.1

I’m a fan of both OS 3.x and OS 4.x in terms of the way they look. I remember in the 90’s, screenshots were all the rage. There’s even an aminet location for just Workbench screenshots.

OS 3.9 default:

OS 4.1 default:

There was a 4-page thread about doing a 3.9 -> 4.1 makeover on EAB, I would think that it would be simpler to just do the following:

– Install AfAOS4.7: This is AROS for Amiga. It is part of the AROS source, ported to classic 68k Amigas and allows for advanced skinning of windows, and the use to TrueType fonts.
I found that that built in installer didn’t do what it should have. I ran the installer than manually copied over the other files. The guide file included will tell you what to copy for manual installs, and where to put changes into the startup-sequence to work.

Once that is done, and you restart, you can then run the pref programs to add TTF font files and set them up in the Fonts pref program. Also, you can pick the preinstalled skin (or download another from Amiga Look). There is one that makes it look like the Amiga OS4.1 windows.

I think it doesn’t work nearly as well unless you have some soft of RTG system. This would mean having either Picasso96 or CyberGraphX (3 or 4) installed along with an RTG graphics card (like native ones such as Picasso, CyberVision, etc) or something through a PCI adapter like Mediator or Prometheus.

Also, I wouldn’t do this on anything less than OS3.9 with the 4 boing bags installed.

– Get custom icons. For OS4.1 appearance, Mason Icons are freely available online.

There doesn’t appear to be an auto-installer to magically replace all of the icons.You can look up how to change the default icons, or you can indivdually right click an icon, select information and drag a new icon from a pack you’ve downloaded over the image of the icon in the information windows. Slow but worth it.

To take any png file and make it into an icon, you can copy it to your amiga, change the extension from .png to .info, then bring up it’s information window, and drag the image in there to the image of a target icon you want to change.

Very cool stuff. Just those two will do wonders for your classic, OS 3.x system.

[Side Note for other Amiga-like systems]:
I think AROS has an OS4.x theme, and if you are using MorphOS and want to change, there is a theme on morphos-files.net that is called ofour that will do the work for you.

Advertisement