Deluxe Paint on the Commodore Amiga
14 comments
·September 5, 2025ZenoArrow
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...
silicon5
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
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.
richrichardsson
There is also a DPaint inspired app which can run in the browser.
edit: you can even "Preview in DPaint" which has an embedded emulator!
ChristopherDrum
Stone Tools author here. I did mention that web app twice in the story, though I didn't catch that "Preview" function!
binaryturtle
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
They did not mean a circle drawn by a circle tool, but instead freehand drawing curved shapes.
ChristopherDrum
Correct. I did not say anything about the circle tool being slow.
snarfy
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.
weinzierl
"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.
ChristopherDrum
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
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4EFkspO5p4
Reminded me of this: deep dive into an early artwork done in Deluxe Paint
afandian
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!
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