An Ode to Deluxe Paint (2023) | Hacker News Reader

An Ode to Deluxe Paint (2023)

datagubbe.se

196 pointsarexxbifs55 comments

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...

Very cool! I never managed to do anything in Deluxe Paint except for maybe a stick figure or something like that, or just random shapes/colors. Since then I’ve always been curious, what is the process to make an image like the one you made?

First on paper to figure out the concept. At this point I had a black and white scanner, so I could scan a pencil sketch in a different program as a starting point. I think I brought in the grayscale scan into DP, extracted essential 1-bit outlines, then wiped out the palette except for that outline color.

I definitely had photo reference for the realistic elements like water reflections and the doll face. These were newspaper and magazine clippings that I collected for the purpose. I’d look at the reference while drawing.

Designing the color palette was a surprisingly difficult problem. Using all the 256 colors would drive you crazy when trying to switch between them. DP had shortcut keys to navigate the palette in increments of one and 16, so a decent strategy was to make roughly value-equivalent color gradients with 16 or 32 shades. Then you could use the +1/-1 palette shortcut to change the value and the +16/-16 shortcut to change the hue.

With the color palette in place, the first step was to block out everything using colors at roughly 4-step increments within the hue gradients. That produced a jagged color sketch that could be used to set the design in place. And then just finish with tedious manual pixel work over the 320*200 buffer.

The built-in tools like Smooth and Gradient were not really useful if you cared about good antialiasing and dithering. It was something like a point of pride to do this manually.

Incredibly fascinating. Thanks a lot for sharing this!

> DP had shortcut keys to navigate the palette

It might be obvious to gamers, but the idea is that you have one hand on the keyboard, and the other on the mouse.

reall really really good. I know what it takes to do that !

Oh, hey, I recognize that style! Loved the Sunflower demos back in the day. :)

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...)

That King Tut image was really sensational back then, at least for early teenage me, and for a computer that was within imaginable reach (the Amiga, of course).

By the great Avril Harrison, one of the artists behind the Monkey Island games, whose likeness is said to have inspired Elaine!

It's shame I learned her identity only today! I assume you are referring to Monkey Island's Elaine Marley.

Is there another Elaine?

Avril is also listed as an artist in many other lucasarts games, including Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Also in Prince of Persia (just for the title screen [0], if I understand well).

Definitely, she's one of the outstanding pixel artists in history. All the Deluxe Paint demo images are hers and are mind-blowing [1]. You can identify her works by the "AH" signature, often discretely embedded in some texture.

[0] https://www.abandonware-france.org/ltf_abandon/ltf_galeries....

[1] https://amiga.lychesis.net/assets/AvrilHarrison/

Back when dithering was standard and modem download times for a single image were measured in 10's of seconds.

Do you mean 286AT? Iirc the types of 386 were sx or dx?

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

This is great, thanks for sharing. It gives very strong GIMP vibes, I wonder if it was inspired by Deluxe Paint.

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

Those color-cycling palettes are awesome.

I've love to play a game where each screen was precisely that.

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.

Legend!! The nighttime scenes in Defender of the Crown were (and are still) so beautiful.

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.

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 !

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

AMOS was also my first programming language, which I started learning in 1994, having an Amiga 500. I have fond memories of it.

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)

I loved the split-screen zoom.

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

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

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

The crappy 16-bit-legacy memory model of the PC was probably as costly as "the billion dollar mistake" with Java pointer semantics.

Wasn't Hoare's "billion dollar mistake" back in Algol? We'd been suffering with it for 30 years before Java decided to include it.

1965 according to a quote on his page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hoare

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.

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.

Nice, that's fun to know.

Twilight Zone is my favorite pinball machine of all time.

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.

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.

That looks nice and I love your presentation!

I absolutely loved the press release, I hope you'll do more! I'm not following your project because of it!

Groovy, I love the zoom! any plans to implement color cycling with tab like in the good old days? I used to spend hours tripping out to cool color cycling... I'm a firmware programmer and don't know much about windows, but how easy/hard is it to build for windows? +1 for "Brian Credibility"

I definitely want Palette colour cycling! But getting some support in there for layers is my current priority. Development is driven by whatever missing feature currently annoys me the most :-)

I use https://www.mingw-w64.org for the windows build - which makes it nice and easy to get the compiler and dependencies installed (Qt, libpng, libjpeg, giflib). Once you've got the dependencies set up it Just Works (tm), on Linux, Windows and Mac (although I don't have a mac to build/test on these days).

Love this and will use it with my kid this weekend. Thanks for sharing it.

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

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...

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.

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

That, and I believe it was capable of doing color cycle style animations as well, similar to what IBM VGA was able to pull off.

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.)

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

Yeah, but they were building images for bit block transformations in a defined screen resolution...which was quite low by today's standards.

Building assets like this is unthinkable today since games are run on a variety of resolutions...all of which are enormous compared to EGA/VGA.

Some of it was pixel by pixel, but DP had many tools - sprites, lines, fills, etc. A skilled operator could whip something up surprisingly quickly.

Metal Slug is what I consider the ode to pixel art

Anyone know if they used dp2?

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...

MacPaint of course :)

Microsoft Paint started out as ZSoft Corporation's "PC Paintbrush" for MS-DOS in 1984. The first version of Deluxe Paint was released in Nov 1985.

I was expecting a discussion about Farrow and Ball.

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