New release of Costa - version 1.6.0

It’s that time again - a new version of Costa has been released, after almost 6 months of waiting. This time, the most notable feature is the ability to switch between two screen modes on-the-fly - EGA and VGA. Almost all icons have been replaced with new ones in order to rid Costa of the only proprietary content that was included, and a new default theme is used. And, as always, there are bugfixes and other improvements.

The support for EGA and VGA graphics have already been described in a previous post, so I won’t dive into detail with that. Suffice to say that Costa can now run on EGA adapters with at least 64 KB video memory, as well as all VGA adapters. This broadens the supported hardware platforms for Costa, and gives a pretty decent speed increase when running in EGA mode.

Visually, this release comes with a slew of changes as well. Almost all icons have been remade, as most of them were borrowed from Windows and other software. Since these icons were proprietary, and I wanted Costa to be fully open source, I have drawn my own icons to replace them. Now, I am no graphics artist, so they might not look quite as professional as the old ones, but I think they’ll do just fine. If you have drawn any icons, feel free to send them to me or submit them to the GitHub repository.

The default theme has been changed from a black to a cyan color. I chose the colors because I liked the look, but coincidentally I wound up with something that reminds me a bit of OS/2 2.0. I wasn’t aiming for that, but I like the colors, so I’ll keep them. Let’s call it an homage to OS/2.

Full changelog this and previous releases are available in the archive.

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