.INFO

Introduction

On the Amiga, the icon of a file, drawer or disk is a separate file with the same name plus .info: the icon of Paint is Paint.info, and the icon of a disk is Disk.info. Workbench, the Amiga desktop, shows only things that have one.

Besides the picture, the file holds what Workbench needs to use the icon: its type, its position in the window, the program that opens a project, the stack size, and “tool types”, short text settings read by the program. Later systems added more colourful icons: NewIcons stored in the tool types, and the colour icons of AmigaOS 3.5, appended to the file as an IFF FORM ICON.

Structure

The file is a dump of the Workbench DiskObject structure, big-endian, followed by the data its pointers refer to. It starts with the magic number E3 10 and the version, 1. Next comes an Intuition Gadget structure that gives the icon’s width and height and whether a second image is used when the icon is selected. Then follow the icon type (disk, drawer, tool, project, trash and others), the pointers to the default tool and tool types, the position and the stack size.

Pointer fields in the file are not real addresses; a non-zero value only says that the matching data follows. Drawers and disks then have a DrawerData structure with the window size and position. The images come next, each a 20-byte Intuition Image header followed by its bitplanes, and last the default tool and the tool type strings, each with its length in front.

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