from Hacker News

An Ode to Deluxe Paint (2023)

by arexxbifs on 5/19/24, 12:26 PM with 55 comments

  • by pavlov on 5/21/24, 1:06 PM

    The very last picture I ever made in Deluxe Paint II, in December 1998:

    https://anioni.com/pauli/site1999/work/seqjesus.html

    I think I spent 40-50 hours on it, trying to ensure every pixel is right. Teenagers have time...

  • by smetj on 5/21/24, 8:36 AM

    I remember the first moments switching from C64 to a 386AT PC with VGA card/screen and be blown away by Deluxe Paint II's included artwork named pueblo (http://www.randelshofer.ch/animations/anims_ibm/electronic_a...), kingtut (https://www.datagubbe.se/dpaint/img/kingtut.png) and of course celtic (https://amiga.lychesis.net/assets/AvrilHarrison/AH_Celtic.pn...)

  • by gardaani on 5/21/24, 10:00 AM

    There's a web-based version modeled after the original Deluxe Paint with source code available: https://www.stef.be/dpaint/

  • by corysama on 5/21/24, 4:53 PM

    If you want to see what a master of Deluxe Paint palette cycling can do check out Mark Ferrari's

    http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/ (hit "Show Options)

    and

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0

  • by sys32768 on 5/21/24, 4:06 PM

    No mention of Deluxe Paint without mentioning the legendary pixel artist Jim Sachs who used it a lot in his Commodore Amiga productions: https://amiga.lychesis.net/artists/JimSachs.html

    Amazing what 320x200 pixels can achieve with 32 colors.

  • by surfingdino on 5/21/24, 11:05 AM

    It was the first piece of software I paid real money for. It had to be imported from Germany and the guy who sold it to me told me I was a fool as he could have copied it for me for he price of the floppy disks.

  • by makapuf on 5/21/24, 12:34 PM

    If you like DeluxePaint and Free software, do not forget GrafX2 - http://grafx2.chez.com/ a project dating from the 90s which is a direct descendant of it (pixel art UI included) but still updated !

  • by mirekrusin on 5/21/24, 10:00 AM

    Ahh good old times, remember doing antialiasing by hand for sprites, my brother coding in amos for cannon fodder like game.

  • by Crosseye_Jack on 5/21/24, 10:45 AM

    I’m not really artistic, so while I did doodle in DPaint, my main use for it was to make maps for Worms.

    https://worms2d.info/Colour_map_(first_generation)

  • by pornel on 5/21/24, 9:53 AM

    I loved the split-screen zoom.

    1:1 preview was crucial on CRTs where pixels weren't neat little squares.

  • by peoplefromibiza on 5/21/24, 10:02 AM

    Deluxe Paint is one of the best "definition of done" for software products ever

  • by DeathArrow on 5/21/24, 2:07 PM

    An alternate universe where Amiga is the mainstream computing platform would be fascinating.

  • by foobarian on 5/21/24, 12:46 PM

    I miss the old UI pattern of right-click switching between tools and workspace. Even today I can't seem to get a screenful of tools without sacrificing the area dedicated to the project.

  • by koz1000 on 5/21/24, 2:25 PM

    If you ever played a Williams Bally/Midway pinball machine from the 1990s dot-matrix era (Addams Family, Twilight Zone, Attack from Mars, Medieval Madness, etc), all of the artwork and animation for those displays was done entirely by hand in Deluxe Paint Animation for MSDOS.

    The features like stenciling and animbrush were incredibly powerful. And with a little bit of extra software the exported files could be converted directly into a format for the game software to use.

  • by wgx on 5/21/24, 9:56 AM

    I think it's fair to say that my 25+ year career in design started with DPaint on an Amiga, and I'd be somewhere very different today without it.

  • by EyeballKid on 5/21/24, 10:30 AM

    I feel compelled to plug my own DPaint-inspired app: http://evilpixie.scumways.com/

    You can tell it's a really professional project because I wrote a press release for the last version:

    ---------------------------------------------

    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

    2022-12-13 / SCUMWAYS TOP SECRET VOLCANO LAIR

    Art World Rocked by Amazing New EvilPixie Release

    New version features vibrant, brand new pixels.

    Scumways Corp. today announced a new release of it's legendary pixel-editing application EvilPixie.

    The new '0.3 "Your in test" TCE Shanghai Gutter' release is a revolutionary new development providing an experience unlike any other pixel art package in the history of pixel art packages[1].

    With a huge established audience of dedicated fans[2], this new release promises to take the industry by storm.

    Scumways Corp. spokesman Brian Credibility today said "Our studies show that this new release provides 754.1% more synergy than the next leading brand. The clients we've been working rave about increased pixel yields, and love the enterprise-wide approach to the unique value proposition when integrated into quadruple-A next-generation middle-out distributed landscape personal environment cloud-based network-enabled local client ecosystems."

    Via séance, notable artists have also given their unanimous endorsement:

        "I'll definitely be using this to demonstrate Commodore's next computer." - Spirit of Andy Warhol
    "Questa fantastica app sono i fottuti testicoli del cane!" - Spirit of Leonardo Da Vinci
    "Se ve un poco raro" - Spirit of Salvador Dali
    EvilPixie is hand crafted from organic, fair trade, ethically-sourced local electrons. It's very Eco. The new version can be downloaded at:

    https://github.com/bcampbell/evilpixie/releases

    [1] Except Deluxe Paint, which it apes shamelessly, down to the keyboard shortcuts. And all the Dpaint clones, of course. And asesprite. And ProMotion. And all the other pixelart apps. But other than that, there's _nothing_ like it out there!

    [2] The programmer and his 11-year old daughter, who use it occasionally.

  • by smusamashah on 5/21/24, 3:01 PM

    Found Deluxe Paint running in browser (via JS port of DosBox?) https://www.dpaint.org/

    Another one via DosBox https://classicreload.com/dosx-deluxe-paint-animation.html

  • by EyeballKid on 5/21/24, 9:18 PM

    In a similar vein, there's also this 2008 blog post about DPaint which nailed a UI concept I kind of sensed but couldn't articulate:

    "The importance of Exuberance in User Experience" (Site seems to be down right now, but the wayback machine has it) https://web.archive.org/web/20160611170615/http://designblog...

  • by btbuildem on 5/21/24, 4:20 PM

    I'm no graphic artist, but I remember using DP for this and that in the mid-90's. It was a fantastic piece of software -- it exploited all the machine had to offer, but moreso, all the tools / affordances were tuned just so. It was purpose-made, and it served it's purpose extremely well. The incredibly creative visual artifacts of games and demos of that day stand as testament.

  • by jedisct1 on 5/21/24, 12:31 PM

    On Atari ST, Neochrome was such an awesome pixel art editor. I spent countless hours designing fonts pixel by pixel using it.

  • by banish-m4 on 5/21/24, 7:26 PM

    Deluxe Paint II Enhanced and Deluxe Paint Animation for DOS represent. Fantavision honorable mention. A decade later: 3D Studio, Maya, and Kai's Power Goo.

    (Couldn't afford an Amiga or a Macintosh, and a PC.)

  • by DeathArrow on 5/21/24, 2:08 PM

    It should take a titanic amount of effort constructing an image pixel by pixel. Hats off to those artists that did it.

  • by pengaru on 5/21/24, 3:34 PM

    Metal Slug is what I consider the ode to pixel art

    Anyone know if they used dp2?

  • by candiodari on 5/21/24, 8:53 AM

    Well, at least one can clearly see where Microsoft got the idea for paint.

    https://betawiki.net/wiki/Paint#/media/File:Windows_1.0_alph...

  • by demondemidi on 5/21/24, 1:23 PM

    I was expecting a discussion about Farrow and Ball.