3 ms·

> It also demonstrated conclusively that, beyond games, graphics hardware acceleration was going to be essential for hi-res color imaging productivity. I'm not

by mkl 4y ago

> 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?

SideQuark 4y ago
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.
- mkl 4y ago
  Palette cycling isn't "essential for hi-res color imaging productivity", so I don't think it's what they were referring to.
  - SideQuark 4y ago
    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.
mrandish 4y ago
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.

by mkl 4y ago

SideQuark 4y ago

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.

mkl 4y ago
Palette cycling isn't "essential for hi-res color imaging productivity", so I don't think it's what they were referring to.
- SideQuark 4y ago
  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.

mrandish 4y ago

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.