Deluxe Paint on the Commodore Amiga

https://stonetools.ghost.io/deluxepaint-amiga/

75•doener•3d ago

Comments

silicon5•9h ago

The author notes that circles don't draw well due to mouse polling, but I wonder if this isn't a limit of the emulator running on Windows. I remember Deluxe Paint III on the Amiga drawing freehand circles very well, whereas MS Paint on Windows 95, quickly drawn circles ended up looking like polyhedrons due to infrequent polling.

There's a neat modern DPaint clone called PyDPainter (https://github.com/mriale/PyDPainter). It has various advantages, such as support for modern graphics formats like PNG.

ChristopherDrum•9h ago

Author here. I did not say circles don't draw well. I said that "swiftly-drawn curves are flattened" and likened it to a "large wash." By that I mean long, swift, edge-to-edge brush strokes. Perhaps the use of the word "curves" confused that point, but the natural arcs of human hand/wrist motion are what I wanted to evoke. I also noted a "fat brush in symmetry mode" exhibits the same effect. I can attest to two points about that from firsthand experience:

1. That was also true on original hardware (when I owned the system in my younger days). I distinctly remember having to slow down certain movements to let the system keep pace, depending on speed and complexity of motion. 2. The effect is drastically improved (and I note so in the article) by choosing a faster virtual CPU.

binaryturtle•8h ago

Why would the mouse polling speed mess up the circle drawing itself? You record the start position point (center) and then get the new mouse position and calculate the delta to the start position to get the radius, then draw the circle with the values. Same algorithm.

unwind•8h ago

They did not mean a circle drawn by a circle tool, but instead freehand drawing curved shapes.

ChristopherDrum•7h ago

Correct. I did not say anything about the circle tool being slow.

richrichardsson•7h ago

There is also a DPaint inspired app which can run in the browser.

https://www.stef.be/dpaint/

edit: you can even "Preview in DPaint" which has an embedded emulator!

ChristopherDrum•6h ago

Stone Tools author here. I did mention that web app twice in the story, though I didn't catch that "Preview" function!

3036e4•1h ago

Also this older clone: VGA Paint 386 (https://www.bttr-software.de/products/vp386/)

It runs in DOSBox, making it a bit easier (imo) to get running on most computers (and Android devices) than old Amiga software (even if I have FS-UAE and Amiga Forever installed as well on my desktop computer).

ChristopherDrum•9h ago

Author here. It's very kind of OP to post this on my behalf. I'm happy it is resonating with people. Maybe I should have self-promoted here sooner, but I thought I should put a little more meat on the blog's bones before posting it here. Maybe I was wrong!

andrepd•7h ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4EFkspO5p4

Reminded me of this: deep dive into an early artwork done in Deluxe Paint

afandian•6h ago

When he manually measured the columns, then manually quantized the colours, and then manually re-created the image I was metaphorically shouting at the screen "talk to a developer!".

I get that the point of the exercise was to re-create the process by hand using original(esque) tools rather than by using power tools. Another, valid, aim would be to attempt to re-create the image as closely as possible.

Still, impressive result!

weinzierl•7h ago

"Maybe this would be the day I finally saw an Atari 1450XLD in the wild! I was obsessed with the futuristic stylings of that line; they looked powerful."

I'm a Commodore guy, always was, but god were these Ataris beautiful.

snarfy•6h ago

I had a very similar experience growing up, except the Amiga was a 500, replacing a Mattel Aquarius, and Deluxe Paint III just came out.

ZenoArrow•5h ago

Some may be interested in this demo of the animation features added to DPaint3 (demoed by Dan Silva, the main author):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjIQO1MjV2w

Also, looks like the source code for DPaint1 has been made available:

https://computerhistory.org/blog/electronic-arts-deluxepaint...

https://github.com/historicalsource/DeluxePaint

77pt77•1h ago

Written in C!

I always thought it was written in ASM.

amiga386•4h ago

To give credit where it's due, the 32 colour King Tut image that Deluxe Paint's mascot was drawn by Avril Harrison. More of her graphics: https://www.amiga.lychesis.net/artists/AvrilHarrison.html

(I see the article now credits her on the image subscript?)

Also, the article mentions the colour-cycling animations of Mark Ferrari, but you might also like a big collection of specifically Amiga colour-cycling animations: https://www.amiga.lychesis.net/specials/ColorCycling.html

esafak•4h ago

It's nice to finally learn the creator of that picture.

johtela•1h ago

There is something captivating in these old pictures that elevates them to pieces of art rather than just computer graphics. The sheer amount of work that went into crafting them makes each one special.

3036e4•1h ago

Great post! Pretty much all that is said about the user interface also applies to the ~contemporary Autodesk Animator for DOS (open source here: https://github.com/AnimatorPro). It has the advantage of running in DOSBox.

Not having layers is frustrating, but also in some way fun. I have not used Deluxe Paint much, but in Animator there is a second Clip screen, it is possible to save and load the clipboard (i.e. "CELs") as well as the current image using keyboard short-cuts, and then there are some other nifty features like "copy everything that changed in this frame since I came here"... The more I play with it the more workarounds I find for things that otherwise would have been easy to do if there were layers.

Also have that set up on my phone, with a lot of on-screen buttons configured in DOSBox. Works well and doesn't come with any of the annoying in-app-purchases and/or ads that all the app painting programs seem to be full of. I even bought a stylus to use with Animator on my phone.

juancn•1h ago

Gosh! So many fond memories!

Deluxe Paint IV on my Amiga 500 was fantastic. I had so much fun making dumb animations with my friends.

I think I still have the diskettes, I just need to fire up Greasweazle to dump those.

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