MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today
46 comments
·July 12, 2025seabombs
lukan
Hm, are you sure that there is not some nostalgia at play here?
To me they look horribly pixelated and at least some would improve aesthetically a lot for me with a higher resolution.
zozbot234
Even today these pictures have an almost perfect resolution for showing on a compact e-paper display. The viewing area on the original Mac models was not that much bigger, either. They only look "horribly pixelated" when artificially upscaled for a modern big screen.
(A pixel-art specific upscaling filter would mitigate that issue, of course.)
lukan
I was viewing them via a small mobile screen, not high DPI, not fullscreen. And to me, they simply don't look good the way they are.
But if you folks enjoy them, go for it. Otherwise taste is subjective I think.
kjellsbells
The street scene is by Gerald Vaughn Clement, the inventor of MacGrid, a drawing program that used a sort of plastic grid to perform high detail drawing and digitization.
https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/macgrid
Incidentially /r/VintagePixelArt often has discussions about this sort of thing.
HPsquared
Similarly, some cave paintings still look awesome.
gxd
Awesome! You can also find great art made with Deluxe Paint for the Amiga. The limitations from early computers in resolution and, most importantly, palette, create unique art styles:
pwillia7
If you use Stable Diffusion/FLUX -- check out this Deluxepaint LORA[1]. I might make one for these macpaint images too in the near future.
[1]:https://civitai.com/models/875790/amiga-deluxepaint-or-fluxd
spankibalt
"Press button for YOUR instant demoscene imitat". Sad.
necrosyne
Please do! This would be amazing
dan-robertson
These seem worse IMO. Not sure if it’s the medium (eg more saturated colours, the particular website) or if I just like the compositions less.
zozbot234
They have more color but way less resolution, thus less detail. Pretty much what you would expect to see, given that the original Mac and Amiga came out around the same time.
keyringlight
There was an article posted here not too long about with a similar sentiment about the NEC PC-98
andrepd
Loved this dive on one such Deluxe Paint piece: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4EFkspO5p4
ekianjo
some better ones here
taylorius
The lack of photorealistic fidelity gives your brain a bit of room to use imagination to fill in the blanks in your internal model. This fosters a certain type of engagement with the content that you don't get with photorealistic images.
poisonborz
I envy that small world, where people could be this genuinely enthusiastic about their computer products and companies, where most actors seeked the best interest of other parties.
aidos
Love it.
At the end of the article they mention digging in to the Amiga scene. If you want to feel old, Deluxe Paint turns 40 this year. My mates had Amigas (I had an Amstrad) and the computing world just felt full of wonder and promise. It was a magical time of creation.
Mizza
That first one looks like a parody of 'View of the World from 9th Avenue' but I don't know what Acius was!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Ave...
decryption
I wish I knew what Acius was or is too!
B1FF_PSUVM
From a search for "acius mac": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4th_Dimension_(software)
Software outfit founded by a French guy, as hinted by the drawing with Paris visible ...
(Those "view from ..." were plentiful at the time)
reconnecting
Then we should probably mention
(From page HTML source) <!-- ******** HELLO OLD COMPUTER USERS ******** --> <!-- This site is designed to be viewable at 640x480 resolution or higher in any color mode in Netscape/IE 3 or any better browser, so if you're using an LC III or something, you're welcome. In fact, I really hope you are using such a machine, because limiting the site to this level of simplicity wouldn't be worth it unless someone is. Please let me know if you are using an old computer to visit the site so I know it is worth it to someone to maintain this compatibility. I do apologize for the one javascript error that you may get on each page load, but I don't expect it to cause any crashes. The major exception to all of this is Netscape 4. That thing sucks. -->
Does anyone even remember why Netscape 4 was bad?
spydum
Browsers were changing quickly back then, but if anybody remembers, it became Netscape Communicator and tried to expand to do everything..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator#:~:text=Thi...
reconnecting
If I'm not mistaken Netscape Communicator was just a pack of different applications, including NN. The real issue seems to be was specific CSS and some style rendering.
jfim
NN4 tended to crash more than NN3, it may have been due to the rushed development during the browser wars.
reconnecting
There was problem with styles and tables.
numtel
I think it was a total rewrite, similar to why Winamp 2 was great, fast, not bloated but Winamp 3 was slow, adding extraneous features nobody wanted.
reconnecting
True, Winamp 2 was much solid. Unless I'm mistaken Winamp 3 introduce skins and after absolute madness starts.
JSR_FDED
This dithering is somehow so pleasing. It’s like “sand dithering”.
zozbot234
Thanks for finding this! A relic from a more civilized age.
Dante690
Really interesting. I’m wondering if there’s any LLM or image model on Hugging Face that has been trained specifically on low-res black-and-white images like MacPaint. Has anyone come across something similar or seen a fine-tuned model in this specific retro visual style?
sgt
Not sure why you're being downvoted. I'd like to see this, too. Just for fun.
There's a term I read about a long time ago, I think it was "aesthetic completeness" or something like that. It was used in the context of video games whose art direction was fully realized in the game, i.e. increases in graphics hardware or capabilities wouldn't add anything to the game in an artistic sense. The original Homeworld games were held up as examples.
Anyway, this reminded me of that. Making these pictures in anything but the tools of the time wouldn't just change them, they'd be totally different artworks. The medium is part of the artwork itself.