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

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.