Nectarine

Hello everyone. Our beloved mirrorbird created some new platform icons, and we are testing them out this week. Hopefully he will be along to explain the scheme in more detail, but the icons are coloured such that similar platforms have similar colours, so that we can see at a glance what the queue will sound like. And there are cool icons to make different platforms more easily distinguishable. For my part I am really, really happy not to be mixing up YM and XM anymore!

Feedback is welcome; please post in this thread!

(if you don't see the icons at first, try forcing a page reload)

Bravo, mirrorbird .

Great job, they're a lot more readable!

Bugs:
- On this page you can still see the old YM icon: https://scenestream.net/demovibes/platform/5/
- SAM Coupé and Falcon are still using the old style.

Some constructive (hopefully) criticism:
- AY/YM separator is barely visible. It could be just white.
- The Atari VCS is missing the Atari logo, maybe because of space constraint but then you crammed TFMX next to the amiga logo so...
- The 'M' in MIDI is not the same than everywhere else.

Purely in my opinion:
- I'm not a fan of the icon for "Custom" like in "Amiga Custom". I wouldn't put anything, just the Amiga logo.

Well done! =)

I once made many graphics here and there with photoshop- mostly background pictures .....

I would like to have:

+ fonts bigger/broader for reading purposes
+ chip somehow with fewer alpha, more transparacy
+ logos a bit more little while maybe greyed out
+ the fonts could be fitting to the chip, that means they have to be 3-dimensional recreated for the angle the chip stands.

+ more focus on the font, some logo and of course not so big chip itself-

thanks. you are using which program? if you have adobephotoshop that's a child's play, and there are many programs also online (pixlr.com / whatever).

Nice icons!
I echo sebonpsp's opinion regarding the custom ones.

This could have been done ten years ago but better late than never...

(During the years I had proposed that we could borrow some icons from CVGM)

I would use "BBC" for BBC's & Master System's soundchip since we probably will not have many Sega Master System songs and "SN76" does not really mean anything.

If you want mirror, you could replace the chip with a rectangular background with a white outline.

To see all the new icons, try deleting the browser cache.

SAM Coupé and Atari Falcon need new icons.

i just putt some suggestion into the pool

hm i find the whole chip icon was made for text only. The entire space can be used by just putting of the chipsize limit there and using the full space /2 with PC>>TYPE in that order as 2 Icons like in cvgm ?!

to tint that from grey to anycolor is also not so well but i'm sure they are still in dev...

greetz

MPTM should have the ModPlug logo.

Hi. Thanks for the feedback.

The original idea was just that we would use different colours to show different "families" (of sound chips, or maybe computers). This is difficult because Necta's idea of "platform" is variable, and not all of our platforms are really hardware things. But this is what I decided, *based on what we already had*, and sometimes using "cultural" connections:

A = Amiga = amber (orange). All native Amiga stuff (DBM, AHX, MOD, Amiga-custom etc.)
P = PC = purple. All PC-related stuff (Buzz, PC-IT etc., also "usually PC" stuff like MIDI and MPTM, and Xbox because that's a PC-like platform)
S = SID = scarlet = red (nothing else is like a SID)
Y = YM & friends = yellow (AY/YM, Speccy, Atari and POKEY, etc. and Jaguar and Falcon, but *not* VCS, see below. I include the Sam Coupé here (Philips SAA1099) because it isn't the same technology but seriously only Speccy people know about a Sam -- so the cultural link is very strong)
N = Nintendo = navy (blue) = NES, DS, Game Boy, GBA
E = eight-bit = emerald = green: miscellaneous/obscure 8-bit, for stuff like VIC-20, SN76489 (BBC Micro), Atari VCS, and the old Speccy beeper (what we call "Z80/ULA Sinclair")
other = leave as black for now = anything else, like "Wild", "Live" and the explicit sizecode (16K, 32K, 64K, 4K.exe, 8K.exe): none of these are hardware platforms.

More coming in next post...

One thing I have noticed is that maybe I made the "base"/background colours too dark. I wanted to keep them dark, because they should help the eye, but not be fiery and annoying; however, my home computer monitor has very crazy high brightness and contrast, and I noticed on my work PC that you can hardly see the colours. (Sadly I can't show screenshots because of course it's about the monitor settings, not the pixel colours...) But th4t1guy said he could tell the colours apart. Possibly I could post some colour swatches and people could comment on whether they are distinct enough.

Responding to earlier posts in this thread:

sebonpsp: "AY/YM separator is barely visible. It could be just white." (And VodkaBot asked why the hell is it blue ). --> Yes, we could use the normal text colour. I wanted to show that this isn't a single chip called "AY/YM" but rather two similar chips. Maybe dark grey, or a darker shade of the white? Or would we really prefer pure white for the whole text "AY/YM"?

sebonpsp: "The Atari VCS is missing the Atari logo, maybe because of space constraint but then you crammed TFMX next to the amiga logo so..." -- This is because I put the VCS into the 'e' (green, 8-bit misc) category, and not the 'y' (YM & friends), because it's more like a beeper; and all the Atari stuff was under 'y'. But there's actually no reason NOT to have Atari logo on an 'e' platform: yes, we can do this.

sebonpsp: "The 'M' in MIDI is not the same than everywhere else." Yeah, I did mix up some letters, because of the available space. If we decide to go ahead with the new icons then I will try to be more careful about that (if I can find the space though, lol). I was also personally concerned about kerning/spacing, which is also not consistent.

More in next post...