Is there something wrong with my Workbench 45.3?

[Pat the Cat]

I guess you just set UAE to use a different display type rather than the native Amiga chipset. Then hope your Workbench install has things like RTG graphics setup properly.

It looks to me from first screenshot, Workbench GUI is only using 8 colours to mix from, that's why the display looks awful. The system reserved the first few colours of a pallette for display so windows and gadgets were always visible, at least. It made it difficult to have an invisible and unclickable desktop.

It made looking icons uniform in colour somewhat tricky. Especially if they were inherited from early Amigas. Kind of Commodore 64 icons...

Anyway, setdisplay to Picasso IV or Cyberview or a-n-other RTG graphics, and you should be able to see properly. If you have the drivers installed Amiga side to take care of it (sounds like it).

This version of Amiga Workbench I'm using came  from the Cloanto Amiga Forever 2012 DVD, I copied it over into Windows 7  folders for use with WinUAE 3.4.0, and as far as I know the only loss  has been Amiga-specific file attributes.

... ingenious. I think doing that, especially on files that became write protected and uneditable without the protection bit being reset, would lobotomize any operating system. Not just AmigaOS, any of them, I reckon.

Preserve your flags. Be proud of them, wave them high... or at least make sure the OS can handle them. Otherwise you are asking for trouble. Setting up a system, it has to be organic enough to remember changes.

Later on you back up your progressing, and then you might turn as much as possible into protectable, non editable, but not from the beginning.

[Pat the Cat]

Oh, CBM did a card with a 24 bit pallette. A2410. Timex 34010 squirting  data around a framebuffer nailed onto some 24 big DACs. It was usually  supplied with a Unix Amiga, and was often called Tiga ECS. It only  really displayed 256 colours+3, but it was a definite improvement if you  had a "fast" processsor at the time.

http://amiga.resource.cx/exp/a2410

It  cost quite a lot, and the refresh was a bit poor by the standards of  Zorro RTC cards today. It does have CyberGraphX support. The new one Mike linked to is  much more handsome. Spartan Vs old school Timex - no contest.

[Pat the Cat]

No, not really. It was pushed out the door with Amix equipped Amigas. It didn't support AmigaDOS much, certainly when first "available".

Pay $4,000 for a 256 graphics card. Free A3000 included, together with something that is Unix, but we can't sell it as Unix...

... Not much of a business exercise really.

[Pat the Cat]

It worked for Apple. Build it, and they will come (with wods of cash).

I think that was more of the Nxt than Apple at the time. Certainly the genuine "wod holders" went that way, and gave some to Mr Jobs and friends.

It was a kind of elephant in the room, this thing called Unix, a mainframe operating system... on a desktop. NxtCube was clearly something different, and the 3000UX - looked like a Commodore PC.

The other elephant in the room was Unix's "owner" at the time, AT&T, who'd been told to start getting more of their projects into the domestic sector (people like Commodore, Apple and Next). Or else get further split up and broken apart as an unfair monopoly. It is surely no coincidence that the Targa Truevision series of graphics cards started with AT&T people. They were like an ogre who'd been told to share some sweeties with the little players who made cool toys. They did that, learned an awful lot, and then made their own even nicer toys...

One example of how hopeless CBM were at investing for potential return - the A2410 started as a student project more than any serious development to make a genuine application friendly device. Likewise, software support for it - all end user based, almost no input from CBM at all. It was built around Unix and X mostly. Now it has RTG support.