PyDPainter 1.0.5 – Amiga Deluxe Paint Clone Written in Python
This is great to see, thanks for posting! Here&#x27;s some context for those who aren&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;s 68000 CPU, dedicated graphics hardware (blitter etc) and (comparatively) high resolution and rich color palette, it was also the first time I&#x27;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&#x27;t know any Amiga users who didn&#x27;t have it (and I ran a large users group). Stores pretty much sold DPaint at a rate 1:1 with Amiga sales.<p>While I can&#x27;t say DPaint was the <i>first</i> 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&#x27;s impact was obvious because it clearly influenced almost every popular paint program which emerged for <i>any</i> 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&#x2F;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.