This is great to see, thanks for posting! Here's some context for those who aren't familiar with Deluxe Paint which Electronic Arts originally released for the Amiga Computer (circa 1985). I was a hobbyist user of 8-bit home microcomputers from the early 80s onward with experience on platforms ranging from Atari to Apple to Commodore to Radio Shack. I scrimped and saved to afford an Amiga early on.
Deluxe Paint was a significant step change in paint programs, not only on the Amiga platform but across consumer computers. While there were other paint programs released earlier on the Amiga, such as Graphicraft, they largely followed the existing models of paint software with a few improvements enabled by the Amiga's advanced hardware. But Deluxe Paint was different. I still remember when I first played with Deluxe Paint and how dramatically it impacted me as a frequent user of the leading paint programs on various 8-bit platforms. Deluxe Paint was not just remarkably performant thanks to the Amiga's 68000 CPU, dedicated graphics hardware (blitter etc) and (comparatively) high resolution and rich color palette, it was also the first time I'd ever seen so many cutting edge paint features integrated into such a well-balanced program under a unified and accessible interface. It instantly became the single most popular Amiga program, to the extent that I didn't know any Amiga users who didn't have it (and I ran a large users group). Stores pretty much sold DPaint at a rate 1:1 with Amiga sales.
While I can't say DPaint was the first existence of these advanced features and capabilities, because there was a lot of academic research happening before and around this time period, it was certainly the first broadly available, consumer affordable existence proof for many of them. DPaint's impact was obvious because it clearly influenced almost every popular paint program which emerged for any desktop computer for nearly a decade after. While DPaint clearly owes a debt to much of the pioneering work done on early paint systems (Alvy Ray Smith, Ivan Sutherland, PARC/Alto, etc), DPaint was the first time millions of users were able to experience a synthesis of these capabilities into a whole that really felt like a cohesive and complete system. It also demonstrated conclusively that, beyond games, graphics hardware acceleration was going to be essential for hi-res color imaging productivity.
Oh, I loved making elaborate color cycling drawings and their animation features. I think this is why Guybrush Threepwood in Monkey Island is named "Guybrush", you could have longer than 3 letter extensions and DP2/3? Used ".brush" as an extension. So the original sprite was "Guy.brush".
Anyway, awesome comment, and awesome project if this is you. Love that you use the original Tunankhamen image in the project page, as well.
Close, but not quite. Monkey Island art was done on the PC version of Deluxe Paint, where the filename would have been "guybrush.lbm". "guy.brush" never existed, as per Ron Gilbert himself: https://grumpygamer.com/guybrush_fact_fiction
The PyDPainter project is not me in any way. Just adding some context for those who may not "get" why Deluxe Paint is considered by many to be historically notable.
> It also demonstrated conclusively that, beyond games, graphics hardware acceleration was going to be essential for hi-res color imaging productivity.
I'm not so sure about that. I used Deluxe Paint (a lot!) on a 286 and 386, without such hardware acceleration. Mostly I worked in 320×200 to have 256 colours, but also used the highest resolution, 640×480 16 colours, without apparent slowness despite needing to process over twice as much RAM over three 16-bit memory segments. Or maybe you meant higher than that?
I wasn't trying to assert any kind of definitively precise claim about evolutionary precedent in computer paint tool history (and certainly not an exhaustive reverse claim excluding other achievements on other platforms). I knew DPaint was later ported to PCs and many other platforms although I don't recall ever playing with DPaint on a PC as I was mostly into Amiga until about 1990.
My PC experience was prior to 1985 on 8088/86 machines with early MGA, CGA and EGA graphics cards. I did play with several different paint programs on a real IBM PC XT that a client of mine had in their business office (so it definitely wouldn't have had anything better than whatever graphics card was baseline bundled). My recollection of using that PC circa '83 for paint definitely included the typical experience of being able to see the screen redraw on any kind of wireframe bounded box and definitely bitmap regions being moved on-screen.
At the time, we considered those artifacts "just the way it is" for graphics. I even got to play around a bit with various "high-end" systems of the era including an early SGI workstation and a dedicated "video paint" system for TV station use (a $40,000 box IIRC). While those systems were definitely faster than 8-bit and PC systems I'd seen, I could still clearly see screen redraw on them.
I acknowledge that the hardware may have been capable of smoothly dragging a bitmap region on-screen. Obviously, post-1990 I've seen some wildly impressive demo scene demos targeting PC CGA with hand-coded assembler which show pretty unbelievable potential given enough blood and tears shed. However, based on what I experienced in '83/'84, it didn't seem like the commercial paint software authors of that era were bothering to do the considerable work to optimize for that kind of performance (synchronized double or triple buffering etc). Obviously, the team porting Amiga Deluxe Paint to PC in 1986 had access to Amigas and I suspect trying to achieve similarly smooth performance on their port became a personal goal. Thus, Amiga Deluxe Paint seemed to at least set a bar showing another level of performance was possible and worth aspiring to.
As for the Amiga + Deluxe Paint impacting the perceived value of hardware acceleration for graphics creation tooling, it was at least a revelation to me and many of the computer graphics devs and enthusiasts I hung out with in those days.
Palette cycling was hardware accelerated animation on those platforms, which is why it was used. You could change the palette registers and affect an entire screen much quicker than you could redraw a screen. This is what they meant by hardware accelerated.
Well, you're convinced they were wrong, so maybe you didn't read them well. DPaint did bring palette cycling to the masses, showing hardware tricks that allowed drawing something cool that could not be done without hardware acceleration at that time. It sure made it clear to me (and many game devs in those days) that, along with other hardware tricks (scrolling hacks, sprintes, etc) that hardware acceleration would be necessary for a lot of the graphics stuff we wanted.
DPaint's sister, DPAnimator, used even more hardware tricks to enable many of the features. When a PC/Amiga/?? didn't have hardware support, you simply lost the feature.
"With the permission of Electronic Arts, Inc. the Computer History Museum is pleased to make available, for non-commercial use, the source code to the 1986 version I of DeluxePaint. There are 89 files of C language source, comprising almost 17,000 lines of code in about 474 KB of text."
For the last few decades I've been using Avery Lee's VGAPaint386. I downloaded it in 1997 and I should really get around to updating to the 1.4 version he released in 1998. One of these days I guess.
Deluxe Paint was a significant step change in paint programs, not only on the Amiga platform but across consumer computers. While there were other paint programs released earlier on the Amiga, such as Graphicraft, they largely followed the existing models of paint software with a few improvements enabled by the Amiga's advanced hardware. But Deluxe Paint was different. I still remember when I first played with Deluxe Paint and how dramatically it impacted me as a frequent user of the leading paint programs on various 8-bit platforms. Deluxe Paint was not just remarkably performant thanks to the Amiga's 68000 CPU, dedicated graphics hardware (blitter etc) and (comparatively) high resolution and rich color palette, it was also the first time I'd ever seen so many cutting edge paint features integrated into such a well-balanced program under a unified and accessible interface. It instantly became the single most popular Amiga program, to the extent that I didn't know any Amiga users who didn't have it (and I ran a large users group). Stores pretty much sold DPaint at a rate 1:1 with Amiga sales.
While I can't say DPaint was the first existence of these advanced features and capabilities, because there was a lot of academic research happening before and around this time period, it was certainly the first broadly available, consumer affordable existence proof for many of them. DPaint's impact was obvious because it clearly influenced almost every popular paint program which emerged for any desktop computer for nearly a decade after. While DPaint clearly owes a debt to much of the pioneering work done on early paint systems (Alvy Ray Smith, Ivan Sutherland, PARC/Alto, etc), DPaint was the first time millions of users were able to experience a synthesis of these capabilities into a whole that really felt like a cohesive and complete system. It also demonstrated conclusively that, beyond games, graphics hardware acceleration was going to be essential for hi-res color imaging productivity.