When Deluxe Paint came out with the original Amiga in 1985, it was the killer app for the platform. [Christopher Drum] starts his recent article on just that note, remembering the day he and his mother walked into a computer store, and walked out with a brand new Amiga… thanks entirely to Deluxe Paint. Forty years on, how well can this killer app compete?
[Christopher] isn’t putting Deluxe Paint head-to-head with modern Photoshop; they’re hardly in the same class. Not Photoshop, no, but modern applications that do what Deluxe Paint did so well: pixel art. There was no need to call it pixel art back then, no, but with the resolutions on hand, all digital art was pixel art in 1985.
Or 1989, which is when Deluxe Paint III came out– that’s the last version written by Dan Silva and coincidentally the last version [Christopher] owned, and the one he focuses in on his tests. It has held up amazingly well.
Sure, you don’t get a full 24-bit colour palette, but most pixel artists stick to limited palettes still anyway. You don’t quite get a modern UI, but presence of useful keyboard shortcuts allows a Hands-On-Keybord-And-Mouse (We’ll call it HOKAM, in honour of HOTAS in aerospace) workflow that is incredibly efficient.
About the only things [Christopher] found Deluxe Paint III lacked compared to its successors were a proper layering system, and of course the infinite undo we’ve all gotten so used to. (DPIII has an undo button, but it could only store one operation.) He also complained about cursor latency for some brushes, but we wonder if that might have had something to do with Windows and the emulation layer adding a delay. One thing Amiga was always known for back in the day was the snappy cursor movement, even when the processor was loaded.
There were just as many features he found had been forgotten in the new generation — like palatte swapping animations, or flood-filling line gradients.
Anyone who owned an Amgia probably has fond memories of it, but alas, in spite of Commodore’s recent resurrection, we’re not likely to see a new one soon. On the other hand, at least when it comes to pixel art, there’s apparently no need to upgrade.
(Thumbnail and header image by Avril Harrison, distributed by Electronic Arts with Deluxe Paint.)
https://www.stef.be/dpaint/
kinda clone
Or PyDPainter a much more faithful clone.
https://pydpainter.org/
Brushes lagging has nothing to do with the emulation, it’s just limitations of the hardware.
I can recall large brushes lagging on my A500 back in the day. DPaint II was included as part of the A500 Batman pack I bought, and was heavily used for a variety of things, with output on my Star LC200 colour dot matrix printer. Great memories coming back from that time!
The mouse cursor was a sprite, I assume brushes were drawn.
Old Amiga developer here, I’m pretty sure the brushes were done with the blitter chip. Amigas didn’t copy stuff from one memory address to another, they would just change the address, in a single clock tick, so moving a brush wasn’t hardware constrained. Especially on the original A1000 where all the memory was blitable.
Ya, I loved Deluxe Paint on my Amiga 500, it was so easy to use. GIMP is horrible to use. Sort of like KRITA, but the damn thing doesn’t work with wayland properly when using a Wacom Intuos Pen tablet, wish it did, there is other programs that do. Maybe they can port Deluxe Paint to Linux native, that would be good.
Agreed on GIMP, I use PhotoFiltre. Not the most powerful tool, but for a non-artist like me does all I need in a simpler and more compact package. I used DP on PC back in the day as well, by far the best option and usable even by an art illiterate like me.
Thanks for telling me about Photo Filtre; but you need wine to run it and not sure if it will work with my Intuos Pen Tablet. Just really sux that Krita has the wayland (xwayland) mouse cursor glitch.
I use Pinta for simple jobs and GIMP for more complex ones – Pinta is similar to Paint.net, both being along the lines of a less-awful MS Paint.
Is Deluxe Paint the one that could do symmetrical drawing? Like, while you draw a line it adds N more clones of it distributed in a circular fashion or as tiles (which was great for drawing patterned backgrounds). The only software I’ve seen since that could do something similar was Fractal Paint, another one that would be worth reviving.
True about the mouse cursor. I believe it was hardware supported, it worked even on the Amiga version of BSOD, the Guru Meditation. I remember moving to PC later and having a moment of panic when the mouse froze… I thought the computer died but it was business as usual for it.
It didn’t take too long for mouse cursor hardwarw acceleration to happen, I think Windows 95 had it. Of course you needed non-buggy hardware and Drivers (looking at you ViA and SiS!)
Yes, I remember symmetrical drawing in DPaintIV which came bundled with my A1200.
The animation features were fun too, I’ve not seen it replicated in any modern package despite the prevalence of GIFs on the modern interwebs.
Yes, symmetrical drawing was one of the features and was one of my personal favorites toys within the program. Other programs with the feature I found while writing the article include Affinity Photo (only draw, can’t do fill), Pro Motion NG (settings are kind of hidden, but exist), and PyDPainter (a quite literal pixel-for-pixel rebuild of DPaint 2).
I use Deluxe Paint, personally and professionally for years after the Amiga was past its heyday. Cosmigo developer Jan Zimmerman created ProMotion as a Windows-based successor to Deluxe Paint, and has maintained it for over 20 years now. You can get ProMotion on Steam, or from Cosmigo’s website. And yes, there’s layers. You’re welcome!
We need to lock Ron Gilbert in a room and force him to make a new game with only Deluxe Paint to create the artwork.
After, of course, lavishing him with gold and fine alcohol and various other tokens of our gratitude for him making Monkey Island in the first place, no matter with what tools :-)
Pro Motion NG is kind of a spiritual successor to Deluxe Paint.
What an amazing paint package Deluxe Paint was – I had version 3 and 4 mainly for animation. I had the A500+ then the A1200 (with Amstrad 464 Colour inbetween). I was messing about drawing stick men (my limit 🤣) and my then 3 year old son asked if I could make him move? 19 mini animated stories later. I was gutted when the Amiga “died” I really missed it and the great games created for it especially Public Domain. 💙
Another excellent program for the many people forgot was True Brilliance. As good and intuitive as Dpaint was, True Brilliance was better.
It seems the source code for Deluxe Paint 1 has been made public: https://github.com/historicalsource/DeluxePaint/tree/master
Author here. I appreciate the post and seeing everyone’s comments and memories about DPaint. I do want to clarify that the”cursor lag” wasn’t referring to the ssytem cursor. I should have been more clear in my wording that the painting had lag, which was totally normal on the hardware of the time. If you try it, you’ll understand.
I distinctly remember on original hardware (and I see others posting similar recollections) having to operate some painting operations slowly to allow the system to “catch up.” This wasn’t about the system’s struggle to draw a cursor, it was about the system’s struggle to calculate all of the mirrored brushes in symmetry mode, for example. Some actions simply require more intense computation, and that’s where the “lag” is felt. I note in the article that bumping up the virtual CPU smooths things out a lot in those cases.
dpaint proton ppaint list goes on what i used