PC Graphics Programs of the 1980's
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- Опубликовано: 2 окт 2024
- We take a look at Gem Paint, a couple of versions of PC Paintbrush, PC Paint and 4 Point Graphics which were competing graphics programs for the PC in the 1980's and early 90's.
FreeGem:
www.owenrudge....
All other programs shown can be downloaded from WinPCWorld or similar site.
Congrats on the Meteoric award!! I watched the coverage and was excited to see the well deserved recognition for Area 5150
Thanks!
too bad there aren't any awards given out for vintage PC repair or rescue - Digital Basement would be a shoo-in
I actually was there in person and it was an awesome party. I voted for area5150 naturally. ;) Even though there were lots of good entries!
You should try to get a copy of Autodesk Animator. I used to make all kinds of animations on that. Ran great on a 386.
Deluxe Paint by Dan Silva for Electronic Arts for the PC first released in 1985 and later the III version from 1988 (back then also for the Amiga), was very nice with I believe 256 colors on a VGA graphic card.
Indeed. That is still to come in a later video! Great program.
@@PCRetroTechI was already wondering where it was 😄
Great video as usual, didn't know that Paintbrush wasn't original MS program
Remember "EGA paint" (Rix), "VGA paint" (Rix) and "Animator" (Autodesk)?
Great suggestions!
I was always envious of those with color displays and had to settles of "shades of orange" for a few years when I first started.
Had no idea PC PaintBrush morphed into MS Paintbrush.. perhaps it explains why early versions of Paint had PCX but later ones didn't.
Regarding those glitches (features?) where drawing outside the canvas doesn't carry over outside the visible region: This was carried over into Paintbrush on Windows 3.x, which is most noticeable when you'd try to do a Print Screen capture of the whole screen and paste into Paintbrush. You had to use workarounds like scroll over and down and re-paste each time or zoom out and paste twice.
But in the 32-bit version of Paintbrush (only seen in Windows NT 3.x), it actually pastes the whole screen correctly even outside the canvas.
Interesting. I hadn't thought of checking the Windows Paintbrush to see what happened there!
I had Dr. Halo Plus 3.0 by Media Cybernetics, Inc. This plus version might be an OEM version. It came with my computer mouse. But I hardly used it. Somehow it didn't work properly or the necessary driver selection confused me more than helped me back then as a child. A printer was also missing. Then when I had a printer, I had Windows 3.1 and other paint programs that ran in Windows.
25:40 "Cant for taxation reasons" is some Brexiter level BS. The law stated (1996-2018) that if you imported into EU a product capable of recording video it was covered by ~5% import duty. This tax on video cameras triggered on anything with >30min video recording. Probably meant to keep Sony/JVC from killing EU domestic camcorder brands (Philips/Blaupunkt) like they did in US (VHS/TV market killed by Japanese in the eighties). All Japanese picture camera manufacturers said 1 manufacture in EU? F that! thats what Asia is for. 2 Lol no we wont sell 5% more expensive uncrippled versions. 3 We will gladly use this as an excuse to charge much more for Professional gear. Canon and Nikon still pretend this tax exists and keep releasing crippled brand new cameras as an excuse to funnel customers into professional lines of products.
I had Dr Halo on my Juko Turbo XT. I know my friends at school all raved about something called Harvard Graphics - although I never used it myself. I know that many VGA and Amiga games were made in Deluxe Paint - but then came Photoshop which completely dominated the entire market. I first encountered Photoshop ver 2.0 on a Mac Quadra while studying - and even without layers it blew away everything else I had used up to that point.
I remember we used to skip some classes in highscool just to rush home and play around with a paint program called ArtStudio for the ZX Spectrum.
22:34: I haven't tried this, but I suspect it'll do a dark shadow if the current colour and selection is bright.
Perhaps it might even do shades of grey if that colour isn't full-on white or black.
Great video, thanks! Graphics on computers from this period were so exciting, just seeing color on your screen already blew my mind back then.
Had GEM Paint on an Amstrad PC1512. It was no DPaint but it's what we had.
At 25:00 you can also add a bit of 'echo' or 'ghost' effect to the video in your video editing software, it should get rid of most of the flicker.
Nice suggestion. I'm not sure that feature of my editing software is free, but I can take a look.
I loved the user interface of Autodesk Animator.
That was one I definitely used but it was far more than a drawing program.
My favorite DOS raster painter was Neopaint which I discovered on some shareware floppy disks. It is one of the later programs though with initial release being in 1992 and the latest DOS version being made in 1998!
Yeah neopaint was awesome!
I didn't think of that one, but I remember using it actually. Thanks for the suggestion.
I never managed to start PC PaintBrush in DOSBox. I believe that program requires a very particular version of the Microsoft Mouse driver. If it can't find it, it won't start.
That's a bizarre problem. I don't recall an issue like that on real hardware, but maybe I just got lucky.
I've seen the tiger in an Atari ST mag. It's one of those things embedded in my memory. Something that I have never seen is the art package we used one year in primary school. I have zero idea what it was and have never seen any sign of it since. All I recall is possibly a blue interface that may not have had buttons but did have mouse control. It most certainly did have a symmetry tool with both 2 and 4 way reflection. Maybe you're due to cover it in your next video but I'm not keeping my hopes up! That app way probably some extremely obscure educational tool from a BBS passed around from teacher to classroom. Might not have even been an IBM PC. Who knows!
I've definitely seen that program and thought it was ZSoft PC Paintbrush, but when I went looking for the option I couldn't find it. Somehow I must have gotten it mixed up with another one.
I was left wondering what makes implementing of a diagonal ellipse so difficult? couldn't such a thing be implemented with basic vector mathematics and trigonometry? a bit of 2d vectors + use of sin and cos. that's it. Base axis are now just 2d vectors instead 1d vectors.
Yes, the formula is not difficult. The issue is just getting it efficient and making sure that the right pixels get drawn. If you use floating point arithmetic it is trivial, but this will be very slow.
Congratulations on the meteoriks win! Was a pleasure to be on the jury this year, don't suppose you'll be heading over to NOVA demoparty this year? :)
That is actually possible, though I'm not sure if I'd have anything to enter. Thanks for doing Jury duty. That must have been quite the effort!
I loved PC Paint (and its alternate version Pictor) and was actually granted the rights to distribute PC Paint for download by the original creator. The outline and drop shadow effects are actually pretty consistent, but much of it is dependent on which colours you select as the primary and secondary colours. They outline (or draw a drop shadow) in the secondary colour for any pixels that are in the primary colour.
Nice. I think I saw mention of that when I went looking for this on the web.
The hatched lower half of the image in Gem Paint (you can see it clearly in the tiger's face which should be whole as in the original image) means you don't have enough conventional memory, IIRC
That's possible. There's not a lot on this machine. One of the programs wouldn't load some images due to there not being sufficient memory.
I remember using a paint like program called "Dr. Halo" in the 80s, it was late 80s but the software looked older.
These softwares all looked almost the same to me, wonder who was the first that was the "ispiration" 😆
A very interesting question indeed. I wonder if I can figure that out. I did notice the same thing. So far Gem Paint is my best guess, but I'm not sure.
I remember Dr Halo! We had a Genius mouse and I remember using it with Dr Halo. Perhaps it came with it, I'm not sure.
@@bananaboy41 I also had a Genius mouse, so your guess may be correct!
I worked for a learning software company in the early 90s all of the graphics were hand drawn in PC paint 4, it was such a step forward from what we were using before.
Its not until I watched this that i realized just how much the limitations of the tech and how new and exciting it was was quite so responsible for aesthetics and design in print from that era.
Certainly. Of course on the professional end of the scale there were much more sophisticated options, but they usually required specialised hardware or unbelievably expensive software.
I use the app Mavis on my iPhone for recording CRTs. It has a fine tuning for the FPS and can record arbitrary amounts of video. It's not a free app, but cheaper than a camera with all those features...
I've tried to do this, but IPhones have really noisy cameras. I didn't like the appearance at all, though it does get rid of the flicker. I also found it difficult to record audio at the same time and make it sound ok for RUclips.
@@PCRetroTech Sure, whatever works for you. The noise is usually tweakable in apps like Mavis, where you manually can select an ISO setting. And the more recent the phone and higher tier, the better the camera. My old 4S had bad low light recording, compared to my current XR, which is already almost 5 years old! I am just too cheap to spend a lot of money on extra equipment for recording... :)
@@root42 I have a 2020 SE. Not sure if that qualifies as good. But yeah I'd much prefer to spend 1000 on a real camera.
Mmm, one of the first paint programs I used have with my mouse. Unfortunately I'm not at home atm, so can't check what's it called. And if course I programmed my own drawing program in BASIC before that, without mouse support 🙂 (CGA only)
Let us know if you remember to check it. Would be interesting to check it out!
@@PCRetroTech I found the disks! They came with a Genius mouse, and the program is called Dr. Genius. I found it
featured here: ruclips.net/video/jBvbRLGHPAQ/видео.html&ab_channel=DYKOdesigns
What makes me wonder: why did the early versions all miss a magnifier lens? Doing "proper" pixel art without it is a pain for anything more granular than 320x200 on typical screen sizes.
The Mac had this ("Fatbits"), and also many early paint programs on the Atari ST offered this (Megapaint, STaD, MonoSTar).
Are you sure about the comments on GEM Paint, that a rectangle is four lines and a flood fill? Your comment it in a way that it suggests that GEM Paint "assembles" the primitives together to get "advanced" ones like rectangle, but I’d be very surprised if GEM Paint wouldn’t use the rectangle VDI function for this ("v_bar”). And there the filling _must_ work differently than the flood fill from the "can" in GEM Paint. Because if you paint a rectangle "on top" of a checkerboard, the "flood fill" couldn’t fill the rectangle reliably solid. But v_bar() does.
I loved GEM Paint on my Amstrad 1512 and I remember that Tiger well. Not sure if you will cover animation programs but I also used Autodesk Animator and Fantavision by Broderbund. I only used the Amiga version of Fantavision but there is a DOS version and Apple II version.
I think you should have a look at the IBM Drawing Assistant program that was made for the IBM AT with EGA graphics. I used it as a kid to draw all kind of stuff. I remember the included drawings of trees, Europe, the world and most interesting for me electronics symbols. I knew the program as “IBM Tegneassistent” as it was translated into my native language Danish. Thanks for some very interesting videos! Keep up the good work :-)
gem paint is the first thing I remember using on the amstrad pc we got and therefore the first program i remember using when we got it. I drew a yellow elephant with the spray tool.
That's also one of my first memories on the Amstrad PC 1512. That and Basic.
didn't do any paint program but did do the slide transition effects for Aldus Persuasion slide presentation program, and metafile import for Micrographics Draw, and metafile support for Aldus PageMaker desktop publishing app.
For the metafile placement and rendering I used transformation matricies.
For Aldus PageMaker I implemented fixed point math in 80286 compatible assembly language to power the matricies and used a color mapping algorithm devised by the company's color expert. That all produced very nice and relatively fast results. Needless to say such metafiles can get very complex.
Moved on from messing with graphics after that - other than a streaming video plugin a decade later - but that was something entirely different.
25:33: If you find a British or European version of Louis Rossmann, please let us know. There's got to be someone out there who'll make a point of, and campaign out of figuring out how to root, hack and flash your property, that you own, to make it do what you want.
Thanks for covering this. My first one must have been Dr. Halo!
Great video! I used some of these programs back in the day for just fussing around. Pc paint 2 or 3 was one of them. I was going to say Neopaint was a favorite but that came out in the early early nineties. Before that it was paintbrush in windows 2 and 3 or dpaint II for dos.
Congrats on the Meteoric, deserved win
Thanks
This takes me back! This was the first graphics packages I used. Gem was bundled with my Amstrad PC1512, and I remember that black and white tiger being supplied as a sample.
Same here. It must have been 30 years or more until I saw that tiger again fairly recently.
cubic splines or even bezier curves are not super hard to implement. There are quite a few nice books describing the algorithms. Hm... maybe I could also make a Let's Code video out of it... I need more time! 😀
I've been loving your Let's Code series, so please do. They aren't super hard to implement and I should be more precise what I mean. I really like code that doesn't spill registers in the inner loops, doesn't use variables, only short jumps, is really optimised and so on. This is all irrelevant on 386 but is really important for performance on 8086. I have managed to implement horizontal ellipses on the 8086 in CGA fulfilling all these usual criteria. I don't think there is any hope of doing diagonal ellipses this way on 8086, but it can more or less be done on 386 (modulo an exceedingly long code preamble and a bunch of self-modifying code).
I also like to output the pixels directly, rather than write out a list of pixels and plot them in a second pass or call a function for plotting pixels. And if possible the code should make use of symmetry (there won't be any for splines of course).
When I get more familiar with the 386 I'll likely drop some requirements which should make coding easier. I'm told that a 386 DX around 20-25 MHz can do a push or pop in 2 cycles (with a cache making little difference at this clock speed). I need to write some code to verify this and then get a handle on the actual cost for retrieving values from variables. Once I have a better idea of what this actually costs in practice I might allow push/pop and variables in my inner loops.
There's also still some issues related to default 16/32 bit operands that likely have some effect on performance which I haven't pinned down yet. So I still have quite a lot to learn about the 386 before I am able to confidently say I'm really pushing the limits.
I may also switch from MCGA mode to Mode X or Y. That's another set of optimisations.
Anyway, I guess a lot of this is stuff I'll cover in my video on diagonal ellipses when I finally get the code working. So when I say "difficult to do" I mean difficult for a given set of restrictions.
@@PCRetroTech Oh boy, yeah, I wouldn't do those hardcore optimizations. I keep the code in my videos really unoptimized, so people can better follow the ideas behind it. I would do the optimizations later, but my skills in this area are much weaker than yours. I just submitted a tiny 256 byte intro to Outline 2023, my first in decades! But I am pretty happy about how it turned out. I hope it gets accepted! If it does, I will make a video about it explaining how I crunched the size down to the limitation of 256 bytes. I also used only 8086 opcodes -- even though the intro runs acceptably only using a 486 or higher... the effect I chose is just too expensive. Probably you could make it run fast enough so it will have a chance on a 286! 😀
I still have to learn a lot about x86 assembly to make more efficient programs. I do know a lot of graphics algorithms from university, so in theory I could do it...
Mode X and Y aren't necessarily an advantage. They are great if you need soft scrolling or page flipping. But otherwise they mostly are a hindrance. I used them sometimes to get chunkier versions of an effect (by being able to duplicate pixels) for slow machines, but otherwise it's often better to use mode 0x13.
@@root42 Yes, I definitely wouldn't make a video about all the optimisations if the aim was for education. I'm just mentioning it to you to put my comments in the video in context. I may already know the main algorithms for splines, but I'd still be very interested in seeing your take on it. That kind of stuff isn't so easy to search nowadays and it is very possible I've overlooked important things.
@@PCRetroTech 100% agreed. And understanding Splines and Beziers is fundamentally important even in today's game development or engineering applications. It is the basis of a lot of algorithms and more complex topics, such as surfaces and other interpolation methods.
👍👍👍
The Amiga trashed PCs in the 80s
I used DrawPerfect 1.1 when I was a kid.
Interesting. I'll have to check that out. It just qualifies, being 1990.
@@PCRetroTech i used that program a lot as a little kid. it was a big part of what eventually led me towards becoming a graphic designer. funny thing is that i didn't have a mouse back then while using it on an ibm at. it was all cursor keys and hotkeys. i remember making christmas cards for my family where i took the head off of a clipart santa claus and stuck it in his toy bag lol! those computers were something special. programming graphics in gwbasic was a lot of fun too. oh and fractint! big fan of your videos btw.
Weirdo question but could you make some playlists for some of your more unique videos? (like the retro haul series etc).
Made my own playlists only to be able to watch things in their intended order since youtube's suggestions in the right pane has become completely useless. Can't be the only one :)
That's not a bad idea. I'll give it some thought, though earlier on I started series and didn't finish them and others had multiple topics in the same video. I might be able to put series in playlists in future though. I agree it is becoming more difficult to organise things like this.
Pretty interesting, I didn't use PCs until halfway into the 90s and so I grew up with Koala Painter on the C64 and DeluxePaint and later Personal Paint on the Amiga.
Of course there was DeluxePaint on the PC too. I'll have to show that in a later video on the PC I think.
Спасибо за видeo
Dr. Halo !!
Definitely one of the cool ones.
I could only imagine having to work professionally with those softwares, must have been hell compared to today's standards, but it should have been orders of magnitude better than doing it on paper or traditional methods. In any case, excellent video, really thorough and in depth
I think businesses could often afford more advanced software which was probably tailored to their trade. These were very generic programs that the home user and small businesses would have had I think.
Some old devs of 8bit computers created sprites at pixel level, sometimes just by using a sheet of squared paper