An Ode to Deluxe Paint | datagubbe.se

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An Ode to Deluxe Paint

The Kaleidoscopic Magical Motion Machine

Late 2023

Beginnings

When first seeing an Amiga 500 computer, it wasn't the games but a copy<br>of the painting program Deluxe Paint II that really got me hooked.<br>Since then, computers and<br>visual art have forever been linked in my mind. Apart from dreaming of<br>an Amiga of my own, my boyhood interest in technical marvels was never<br>about fighter jets or fast cars, but graphics workstations from SGI,<br>Amiga 4000s with Video Toaster cards, Paintbox machines, 24-bit<br>framebuffers, and similar unattainable hardware.

But the Amiga was where it began, and by now I'm sure it's where it will end for me as well. Deluxe Paint was probably the first productivity application I ever laid eyes on and, since I still use it today, certainly the one I've been using the longest.

As far as software goes, it's made a huge impact on my life. I know for a fact I'm not alone in that - although many people may not even be aware of it. Deluxe Paint, or DPaint as it's affectionately known, started its life as an internal tool for graphics production at Electronic Arts (EA), a company which is today perhaps best known for sports simulation games. Commodore had supplied EA with Amiga prototypes before the machine's launch, and I think it's safe to assume the developers and artists there were immediately impressed by its abilities. In a time when EGA graphics was considered state of the art, having 32 freely definable colors from a palette of 4,096 must have felt like infinite freedom. To make games deserving of the platform good graphics was needed, and that of course required a good graphics editor as well.

King Tut by Avril Harrison

Once the EA artists had started using the program and it had gone<br>through a few cycles of refinement, they realized it was a product in<br>its own right. The first version launched along with the Amiga 1000<br>in 1985 - incidentally, the same year as MS Paint's precursor PC Paint<br>was released. At this point, artist Avril Harrison was employed at<br>Electronic Arts and used DPaint to create a rendition of Tutankhamun's<br>gold mask. The picture became part of the DPaint brand and, just like<br>the program itself, synonymous with the graphics capabilities of the<br>Amiga.

Eventually, Harrison left EA and started working for LucasArts (now<br>Lucasfilm Games). Apart from her artistic talent, I'm sure DPaint<br>proficiency was a marketable skill: In the late 1980's and early 1990's,<br>most graphics for 16- and 32-bit computer games were made<br>using Deluxe Paint. LucasArts was mainly a PC/MS-DOS shop, but DPaint<br>had been ported to this platform in 1988.

Pretty much every Amiga game ever? Deluxe Paint. Monkey Island? Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis? Deluxe Paint, of course. Doom? Yup, Deluxe Paint. Quake? Yes, even that in some capacity, according to John Carmack. In fact, DPaint was the industry standard for pixel graphics creation well into the early days of the Sony Playstation.

You may not, like me, have spent hours and hours of your limitless childhood time in Deluxe Paint. Yet, if you're an old school DOS, Amiga or even console gamer, it will have helped create some of your fondest gaming memories - even if you've never reflected upon it.

The things we got with software of yore

I'm not a retro computer collector and the few boxed Amiga software titles I've owned over the years have been lost by way of accidents, bad breakups, nihilistic landlords and regrettable forgetfulness. Except DPaint. Somehow, I've always managed to keep my own boxed copy stored safely, almost as pristine now as it was when I bought it in 1992. It's as important to me as my Amiga computers themselves: an Amiga without Deluxe Paint is hardly an Amiga at all.

For fans of unboxing videos, the package includes:

Deluxe Paint IV - of course. The program fits on a single, bootable floppy disk with a total storage capacity of just over 800 kilobytes.

Example art and animations.

A working demo of Deluxe Video III, a program for combining together pictures, animations and sound.

Color- and AnimFonts. These fonts are, as the name implies, colorful and animated. Can you imagine a glistening golden cursive being written, pixel by pixel, onto your computer screen? Well, now you don't have to imagine any more.

A thick and thorough manual (with errata).

A keyboard shortcut "cheat sheet", which is actually several pages long.

Information about Deluxe Video III.

A software registration form that I should perhaps fill out and send in now, just to see if I get a response.

These days, thick program manuals are often made light of. We talk about<br>things like discoverability and even how complexity must be<br>hidden from users. I believe that sufficiently powerful<br>software will contain irreducible complexity, which can be<br>taught through a proper manual.<br>It's not that DPaint isn't intuitive - all the basic...