A Clone of Deluxe Paint II Written in Python | Hacker News Reader

A Clone of Deluxe Paint II Written in Python

github.com

174 pointsluismedel51 comments

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

The art is great on its own, but knowing the constraints it runs under and how one image can look so different, or even animated, based solely on the palette, elevates the art to a whole new level.

This could have been an amazing screensaver, or even the world of a AAA Karateka game.

My uncle was a prolific PC software pirate in the 80's, and I remember finding a french game in his collection that I've never seen again. Maybe it was actually a demo or prototype, that used the VGA palette in an incredible way with metallic reflections. Nothing that I saw for many years used those graphics until games started using prerendered 3D, and even those didn't look as impressive. I regret not saving a copy.

See Living Worlds: http://www.effectgames.com/demos/worlds/

There's a iOS and Android app: https://pixfabrik.com/livingworlds/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Blood_(video_game) ?

Looks nice, but it's not that one. The metallic surfaces could have been similar to the bottom alien hand (cursor?) in that screenshot, but I remember those looked way better:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/90/Captain_Blood...

I think it was a demo because it only had an animated intro I didn't recognize from other games, a menu, and the game was a plataformer with a large sized alien or android that could walk and shot. But it restarted (or crashed?) after a few seconds.

More input Stephanie, more!

lol. Yeah, the intro was a rotating metallic object. It used the blue to orange gradient giving it a steel look. I remembered it had this sound of buzzing metal (Transformers alike) which should have been an advanced effect for the PC speakers. The game itself didn't have much content to it, other than the (female?) metallic android, the gradient sky and simple terrain. I guess these elements had so much detail because of their large size.

Here's the answer that ChatGPT gives to this riddle; it thinks that it must be the 1991 game Metal Mutant by French developer Silmarils:

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

The video seems to match your description quite well!

Wow, that's it! But I still think that I played a leaked prototype of that game, because it didn't have any other details like the vegetation, and the rotating cube didn't transform into the game's title. Great to see they actually finished it! lol

So, Metal Mutant (1990-1991) came before Flashback and Legend of Kyrandia (both 1992). I can't recall a previous game that has such impressive artwork. It seems they modified the gradient from blue-orange (sky-desert reflections) to colors that match the environments, which makes it kind of monochromatic. So the prototype looked even better as I recall.

https://archive.org/details/msdos_Metal_Mutant_1991

Yes, I don't recall the game myself. But I recall Flashback. I had an Amiga at the time, but not a PC until a few years later. 1991 probably was about the time when the PC started to catch up to the Amiga in terms of graphics.

I like how ChatGPT can be used to to do fuzzy "queries" like this and come up with the right answer:

https://chatgpt.com/share/4cfcffdc-48e3-4780-a55a-091836c79c...

It guesses wrong to begin with, but then I give it the additional information that the game is French, and it gives me the right answer.

As well as neat environmental effects like that, if you use multiple cycles you can do more involved animations. In 1995, working with graph paper, screenshots, and patience, I made exact replicas of various Lemmings graphics and animations in Deluxe Paint II for DOS. I made a blocker with the foot tapping, head turning, and hair flinging out: https://imgur.com/a/KBuhu1G (a screen recording of an emulator, so the timing is a bit uneven - actual file data in description).

or unreal by the future crew (the tunnel effect) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjYQeMExIwk

It's funny to see this presented as a retro "pixel art" program. I mean I suppose it is given that it is based on a program nearly 40 years old, but the example image that is always shown with Deluxe Paint (and on this clone version's page too) is the famous picture of King Tut's mask. When I first saw that picture back in the day it was the first example of computer graphics that I had to look at twice to determine that it wasn't a photo -- the resolution, and the colors made it seem so real at first.

Yeah Deluxe Paint was mindblowing to me - I spent ages using that program. As amazing as it was, I would still be flabbergasted by what some of the really good artists could do with it.

AFAIK "king Tut" by Avril Harrison is pixel art - which makes it all the more impressive...

https://amiga.lychesis.net/artists/AvrilHarrison.html

It's just that I find calling it "pixel art" (which a style of graphics deliberately made to look crude for a retro effect) odd when it was state of the art at the time. It's like how someone might make a black & white silent movie today in order to be "arty", but someone doing that 100 years ago was just making a movie.

It actually was pixel art, hand ( or rather mouse) crafted by the artist using a real picture for reference. I remember reading an article way back when where they interviewed her about the artwork. Amazing artist who I think at the time worked for Electronic Arts, but was pretty prolific in the Amiga space back in the day.

About 2-3 years ago, I was writing a clone of Deluxe Paint in C/Raylib (referencing the released source code). I got about 50% done and lost my incentive.

It's a big program with a lot of features and caveats, so seeing a completed version is awesome. Congrats.

I didn't know the code had been released!

I had to look up how they did the palleted color blending and found...

https://github.com/historicalsource/DeluxePaint/blob/8493bb3...

Interesting. Looks like it's written as a register value for BLTCON0 (in BLITOPS.C) http://www.amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD_2.1/Hardware_Manual...

Also shoutout to DPaint.js, which runs in the Browser: https://github.com/steffest/DPaint-js/

(Though I will say that Aseprite has taken over as my preferred Pixel Art editor.)

And zero dependencies!

I'd love to know how long the original artist took to paint that image!

I imagine many hours of squinting at a CRT screen, with absolutely nothing better to do. No internet, no mobile phones, apps, social medias, zit.

There was always the free copy of Computer Weekly that would arrive in the post to keep you amused for half an hour or so.

People maybe ... went outside ... back then?

Well, yes, staring at a screen is the digital art workflow just as it is the programming workflow, and deep work (or just most work!) requires not constantly getting distracted.

The artist is Avril Harrison. Other than that, seems to be lost to history. https://datagubbe.se/famous/

(this is a better process than the 1965 NASA version, which involved doing pixel art by hand on paper. A form of human "shader". https://science.nasa.gov/resource/first-tv-image-of-mars-han... )

NASA didn't have to do it that way, they just couldn't wait for it to be processed on the computers

This is a very accurate recreation, impressive.

Be sure to try the color cycle mode by hitting tab.

If you are looking for an open source bitmap drawing program, [grafx2](http://grafx2.chez.com/) is worth checking out. Mature and with plenty of features. It was developed taking inspiration dpaint and brilliance

I wonder which paint programs have options to take account of that pixels on older computers often weren't square shaped.

For instance the Amiga had 16:15 (PAL) and 5:6 (NTSC) shaped¹ pixels.

1: https://amiga.vision/sachs

Grafx2 [0] has support for some retro screen resolutions. Not sure if has everything you have in mind , though

[0] http://grafx2.chez.com/

Look top right in this clone is has a PAL button that switches between square/non-square

The problem with NTSC pixels is that their color is never the same.

The most common early PC gaming resolution, 320x200 wasn't square either.

Deluxe Paint!

Fond memories as I found it coming along with some game I got way back in the 90s for my Amiga 600.

Those were good times~

Pixel art paint programs are an underrated way to learn a lot about a programming language and how to apply various algorithms in that language. For the motivated learner they’re perfect as a third project once you’ve completed something like a todo list and pong. Easy to make as complicated as your ambition and skill level determine.

And then you get into things like mouse input, creating a primitive GUI or even windowing system, printing, saving/loading different file formats... (at least back the early days if you were using something like DOS that didn't have any of that)

I know it doesn’t really matter, but this is one of the worst names for an app I’ve encountered.

That's why commercially the engineers aren't allowed to touch design or marketing.

I was thinking the exact opposite. Maybe I'm too much of a pun-lover or maybe I place too much value on the idiosyncrasies of non-commercial creativity.

Marketing guys don't follow any logic when they're coming up with names. I take the "Deluxe Paint N", where N is a sequence, any day.

It's enough to see how marketing guys are naming smartphones, e.g. Sony Xperia line. It's impossible to know what is the sequence of those phones. E.g. "Xperia 10 III" came before "Xperia 5 IV". It's a mess.

Computer games? Current marketing trend is to name the game using the same name the first part has been using. Nobody cares the name has been already used several years ago, nobody is apparently old enough to remember! Want to search the Internet for information about the old game? Why would anyone want to do that?!

Deluxe Paint was nice and all, but I happened to have DigiPaint for the same system, and boy it had some really wild (for 1989) features, like gradient fills, gradient color blending, fully adjustable transparency painting, and texture mapped manipulation. ALL in the HAM (4096 colors) mode!

Deluxe Paint is what got me into graphic design. The hours I spent in front of that my Amiga pixellating away, no wonder I didn'g get at girlfriend in my teens.

Thanks! I shall use this to create pictures of hot dogs :)

I suck at computer art stuff, but what skills I do have came via many hours of practice with DPaint. It seemed like an impossible sci-fi system made real.

What a blast from the past!

Awesome job, giving me all the warm fuzzies from when I messed around doing the odd bit of pixel art on my old A500 way back when :)

This is so cool it brings an tear to an old mans eye. Thank you for doing this <3

There was a version of this even for the Atari ST.

Degas elite was my goto on the st. Anyone remember animator 1 one the sinclair spectrum?

Seriously, a pixel art painting program with a crude CRT scanline filter overlayed on top, at arbitrary scale instead of strictly enforcing perfect pixels? What is this for, to create a feeling of using an old computer? Even VGA had double scan at 320x200 resolution for better clarity.

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