![]() “The best paint program that you could get was DPaint on the Amiga hands down, on all machines, across all platforms,” recalls Amiga 1000 software engineer R. A DPaint diskette, whether purchased, bundled, or pirated, had become an essential item in many Amiga owners’ collections. This was the apex of the indexed colour, low-resolution era of computer graphics. Electronic Arts released Deluxe Paint 4.5 to support these new capabilities. In 1992 Commodore released the Amiga 40 models featuring the Advanced Graphics Architecture (AGA) chipset that brought higher resolutions and new indexed colour modes, allowing for a paint set of 256 colours chosen from a 24-bit colour palette. The popularity of the Amiga 500 in Europe, and the rampant software piracy on the platform, make it likely that several million European owners had access to a copy of DPaint by the early nineties. marketing team put together bundles that included DPaint and several games. When the low cost Amiga 500 model was released in the United Kingdom, the savvy U.K. Deluxe Paint III notably added the ability to produce frame-by-frame animation and to save a selection of animation as a reusable “animbrush”. Numerous improvements and additions were made to DPaint over the years, often closely tracking new developments in Amiga graphics technology. Even this minimal user interface could be hidden for a distraction-free painting environment controlled by the keyboard. Not one dot was wasted: the tool icons and paint set were squeezed into a narrow column at the rightmost edge of the screen in order to retain the maximum practicable amount of space for the canvas. DPaint’s user interface may look superficially similar to the MacPaint program released with the Apple Macintosh in 1984, but there was little in common between the 1-bit toy and the professional tool that supported live painting with a palette of 4096 colours at 320×200 pixels resolution. Prism became Deluxe Paint and was released in 1985.ĭeluxe Paint was the showcase the Amiga deserved, vividly demonstrating the elegantly powerful custom chipset architecture and pre-emptive multitasking operating system. Upon realising there would be no painting software bundled by Commodore, a video game developer named Electronic Arts decided to port their in-house graphics creation program, Prism, to the platform. It was an early example of Commodore leadership’s unerring ability to squander the technological advantages and strategic opportunities of the Amiga. Multimedia capabilities were the key selling point of the computer, yet no painting software was bundled with it when it went on sale. ![]() The pop star sat for a portrait painted by Warhol using a paint program named GraphiCraft, developed by Island Graphics. The launch event featured special guests Andy Warhol and Debbie Harry. “The Amiga’s graphics are simply outstanding,” Compute!’s Gazette reported of the A1000, “far surpassing the graphics available on any computer sold for less than $10,000.” At a price of $1295, the Amiga 1000 was the world’s first multimedia personal computer. ![]() ![]() The Commodore Amiga 1000 was launched in 1985 with an event held at New York City’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. The competition agreed, and in 1984 the computer manufacturer Commodore acquired Amiga Corporation as a means to stay ahead of arch rival Atari. His team could be proud of their work the computer they had designed was at least half a decade ahead of the competition. Jay Miner, lead architect of the Amiga, attended the 1984 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas with his prototype personal computer. An Electronic Art: Remembering Deluxe Paint on the Amiga Index of essays An Electronic Art Remembering Deluxe Paint on the Amiga
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