10 ms·

KidPix

921 points by wonger_ 2y ago

k310 2y ago
Is there any survival or revival of "Gizmos & Gadgets"? [0] It was a very cool simulation game for various STEM topics, including: • Balance – balancing a scale using different weights and distances • Electricity – constructing various types of series and parallel circuits • Energy – matching activities to energy types: chemical, electrical, kinetic, nuclear, potential, light, heat, mechanical • Force – propelling various sized objects into a flashing hole (depending on ramp, gravity and/or friction) • Gears – constructing machines using gears of various sizes • Magnetics – constructing various north–south pole patterns • Machines – building common objects out of simple machine pieces My daughter enjoyed it. (though she didn't go into science) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gizmos_%26_Gadgets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gizmos_%26_Gadgets!
letmevoteplease 2y ago
I can't figure out how to clear the canvas.
- pcwalton 2y ago
  Eraser tool, dynamite, click anywhere.
relyks 2y ago
This is amazing and brings back good memories. I spent a good portion of my childhood playing with KidPix on a Performa 600 lol
- wildzzz 2y ago
  We had a brand new lab filled with Performa 5400s loaded up with kidpix in elementary school
- cortesoft 2y ago
  The LC for me
georgel 2y ago
The dynamite brings back memories.
- beardedwizard 2y ago
  that's what got me too
- jszymborski 2y ago
  Same! Didn't realize this is what I played with as a kid until that moment.
nickpeterson 2y ago
This is the kind of app I want on an iPad for my kid.
- foenix 2y ago
  You're in luck! I my kiddo loves the kidpix iPad app and it's just a single purchase.
  - dontdoxxme 2y ago
    This web version supports adding to the home screen and you maybe won’t even notice the difference.
  - xiconfjs 2y ago
    Can you provide a link to the iPad app, please?
    - foenix 2y ago
      Sure thing: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kid-pix-5-the-steam-edition/id1249381439 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kid-pix-5-the-steam-edition/id...
      - colinbartlett 2y ago
        Huh, what am I missing? This looks absolutely nothing like the link from OP.
        foenix 2y ago
        So, sometimes software gets these things called "iterations" and "versions" where the authors of the software add features and updates. So while this link isn't the KidPix of the 90s, it certainly has the same gameplay to the point where Im personally transported back to playing this on my Dad's Mactinosh 30ish years ago. Perhaps you can try downloading it and seeing for yourself?
      - 2y ago
footlose_3815 2y ago
Man, I used to spend hours on KidPix back on my old 68k mac. It's not quite the same, and a lot of the effects are not 1:1, but it's still a cool throwback.
Neywiny 2y ago
Maybe a few months ago I got a real hankering for the sounds of KidPix. The theme song is 100% pure lab grade nostalgia for me. Pretty sure I never used the program to its full extent but I loved the funny sound effects. [Editing because I commented before clicking the link. Seems this is some older version. I only used a newer one.]
- duskwuff 2y ago
  I don't remember a theme song from the version of my childhood, but I vividly remember the OH NO! of the undo button (which is, delightfully, included in the web version).
  - Neywiny 2y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMCbnEGGL4E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMCbnEGGL4E I remember the first part to this so well. Wondering if maybe I skipped the rest or I just forgot it. The "wow" is burned into my memory. But as I alluded to in my edit, this seems to be an entirely different generation of product I'm remembering vs this post.
- Gigachad 2y ago
  I used to use kidpix 4 as a kid and recently went and set up a windows XP VM to try it again. Turns out I pretty much was using it to its full extent by just making a mess and blowing stuff up. It’s pretty much impossible to create anything artistic in the program. The lack of layers, zoom, and only one level of undo make it extremely difficult. I have somewhat good drawing skills but wasn’t able to do anything more than a very crude stick figure. Still had a lot of fun doing that though.
  - Neywiny 2y ago
    In a way I appreciate knowing that I didn't miss out on much. I vaguely recall something about animation though? Other than that, I guess that's what I remember too. Just splattering stuff on the screen to hear the funny noises and making nightmare drawings. I'm sure my parents still have some printouts. I recall a bowling ball and pin brush I liked.
melaniecrissey 2y ago
The paint bucket sound makes my heart so happy!
gjsman-1000 2y ago
Believe it or not, there is a Kid Pix 5.0, and it even runs natively on Apple Silicon Macs. Inexplicably though, the company that develops it refuses to advertise it. Maybe it has something to do with their school contracts. You can grab a copy on Internet Archive though. https://youtu.be/ZbB1OuOxUr4?t=64 https://youtu.be/ZbB1OuOxUr4?t=64 https://www.mackiev.com/offers/kp5/upgrade_offer.html https://www.mackiev.com/offers/kp5/upgrade_offer.html
- xattt 2y ago
  There is an iOS/iPad OS version! It’s a killer app for kids.
fswd 2y ago
like something I'd use on my amiga 500 when I was a kid!
keithnz 2y ago
This is pretty cool! My kids are past this now, but they used to enjoy TuxPaint, that's pretty good also.
LarsDu88 2y ago
What the hell? I grew up with this
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Some previous discussion in 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073383
- dang 2y ago
  Thanks! Macroexpanded: Kid Pix as a JavaScript App - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073383 - Aug 2021 (89 comments) Kid Pix in JavaScript/HTML - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28069588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28069588 - Aug 2021 (12 comments) Show HN: JS Kid Pix 1.0.2021 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28064606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28064606 - Aug 2021 (1 comment) Meeting Mr. Kid Pix (2019) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25108875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25108875 - Nov 2020 (16 comments) Meeting Mr. Kid Pix - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20296370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20296370 - June 2019 (2 comments) Kid Pix – The Early Years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11438994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11438994 - April 2016 (1 comment) Kid Pix: The Early Years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1298728 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1298728 - April 2010 (3 comments)
  - SushiHippie 2y ago
    Archive of the Kid Pix: The Early Years page https://web.archive.org/web/20120427215910/http://pixelpoppin.com/kidpix/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120427215910/http://pixelpoppi...
Nition 2y ago
Really cool, I remember using this on a friend's computer in the early 90s. My only complaint is this has a smoothing alpha edge on the pencil and line tools, which gives that unfortunate white outline when using the paint bucket. KidPix is great, but gimmie that classic Nearest Neighbour behaviour.
- yincrash 2y ago
  https://github.com/vikrum/kidpix/issues/16 https://github.com/vikrum/kidpix/issues/16 It appears because the underlying HTML5 Canvas tools are being used, things like antialiasing are unavoidable without remaking certain API calls. I'm sure it could be done though!
  - smusamashah 2y ago
    I think that can be turned off. I tried that recently. There is a global flag we can set to turn of antialiasing. UPDATE: it's image-rendering: pixelated; https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/image-rendering https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/image-rende...
    - smusamashah 2y ago
      This property is already applied if you inspect the canvas elements. Better solution could be context SVG filters https://stackoverflow.com/a/49357655/342095 https://stackoverflow.com/a/49357655/342095 https://stackoverflow.com/a/68372384/342095 https://stackoverflow.com/a/68372384/342095
    - whywhywhywhy 2y ago
      This rabbit hole is a waste of time, as someone who's been down it, you'll find piles of resources claiming CSS and JS flags will give you what you want but it never really gets there. The only way to actually get true aliased brushes in canvas is implementing a line drawing algorithm manually and drawing down aliased circles like how https://gifpaint.com/ https://gifpaint.com/ & https://jspaint.app/ https://jspaint.app/ do it.
mechagodzilla 2y ago
My 6 year old loves kidpix 3 on an old PPC iMac. It was just a great piece of software.
globalnode 2y ago
[flagged]
- globalnode 2y ago
  [flagged]
nhance 2y ago
Wish this had the fun pack
slicktux 2y ago
This was so much fun in elementary school. I still remember going from Oregon trail on the old desktop towers to Kid Pix on the new Apple IMac G3…
- amatecha 2y ago
  Nice, we had it on Color Classics and uhh, I guess SE's or something (hard to remember)... such small screens haha :'D
ericd 2y ago
The original works great on dosbox, too, for all of you looking for the original experience.
jnaina 2y ago
Craig Hickman was my Prof at UofO. Took his Digital Arts class in 1986 for one quarter and wrote an early proto color paint program inspired by MacPaint, on a Graphics Frame Store system that uses serial port to communicate with a Mac 128K. The system had basic graphics primitives built-in and the system drew the images based on the commands received. Forgot the name of said graphics frame store, which if I recall had 8-bit color and had "Vector" as part of it's name (though it uses raster CRT with bit maps and not vector displays). Craig was an early pioneer in using computer color graphics for Art.
- jnaina 2y ago
  Found it. It was the Vectrix VX128 (the 8-bit colour model). The ad from Byte magazine below. http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/vectrix/Vectrix_Ad_Byte_Jun83.jpg http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/vectrix/Vectrix_Ad_By...
- Anon4Now 2y ago
  You might enjoy this, then: http://red-green-blue.com/kid-pix-the-early-years http://red-green-blue.com/kid-pix-the-early-years
  - jnaina 2y ago
    Nice. Thank you. Craig is a wonderful and generous guy, and a great teacher/professor. He noticed that I was looking to learn as much as I can about graphics programming (I was doing Comp Sci) and gave me access to some neat toys, including an Apollo Domain.
    - vikrum 2y ago
      The web app somehow made its way to him! He sent me an extremely endearing message that it was fun to see his 2yo grandson using it! (Craig had originally made Kid Pix for his son who is now a graphic, ui, and ux designer). I let him know I made this port for my own daughter as a pandemic-project.
sgwizdak 2y ago
Give me text boxes and arrow connects and I'll be happy to use this for system diagrams.
makmanalp 2y ago
I don't know why but the sounds make it so much more satisfying :-) It's as fun as I remember it being as a kid.
- rlt 2y ago
  Ooops. Oh No. Boing. Ooops. Oh No. Oh No. Boing.
- leokennis 2y ago
  The "Moving Van" is just fantastic. Vrooom and then a break screech when you let it go.
hedora 2y ago
It's a little confusing that it says Public Domain Version, but it's GPLv3.
dankwizard 2y ago
I like how this gets "Wow, I grew up with this", or "I remember this!" Well... Yeah. If you're of the age, there wasn't an app store and 5000 different apps doing the same thing. There was kidpix. We all saw it. You're not special (Except me, I used KidPix the most! More than you guys!!)
- maxbond 2y ago
  What I see is people enjoying that they all remember the same thing, not claiming they are atomic or special. (Not that I see why people feeling special would be a problem, anyway.)
  - cjbgkagh 2y ago
    I saw the comment as a tong-in-cheek reminder that culture used to be a lot less fragmented.
    - maxbond 2y ago
      Looks to me like they said both.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- nubinetwork 2y ago
  Wooooooow!
SK777 2y ago
Cool app but not a great name
- smugma 2y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kid_Pix https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kid_Pix
erkt 2y ago
These sounds effects are unlocking DEEEP memories. Thank you for sharing!
- gnatman 2y ago
  It's incredible, really. I haven't heard these in 25+ years and yet recognize them immediately. Probably because I heard them repeated 50 million times!
- mlekoszek 2y ago
  I always wondered how I knew what a line sounded like.
holtkam2 2y ago
Love it. I'm curious, anyone know how this was implemented? Is it a webassembly port of the original kidpix code or did he code it up from scratch via JS?
- SuperHeavy256 2y ago
  you can look at the project's github and understand https://github.com/vikrum/kidpix https://github.com/vikrum/kidpix
metadat 2y ago
Too bad it's totally fucked up on android mobile, I'm stuck in the top left quartile. This has all the 90s vibes which I absolutely ADORE! Awesome sounds and UX. The nostalgia is almost too much, it was a uniquely raw and badass time to be a kid in the 90s. "1999" by Charli XCX comes to mind. https://youtube.com/watch?v=6-v1b9waHWY https://youtube.com/watch?v=6-v1b9waHWY Some things are invariably lost to time. <3
- maxbond 2y ago
  The visual references in that video were great. The Steve Jobs took me by surprise, I thought of tech titans being culturally relevant was a distinctly recent phenomenon, but of course 99 was the peak of the dot-com bubble and Apple was huge already.
  - DonHopkins 2y ago
    The Sims reference (https://youtu.be/6-v1b9waHWY?t=112 https://youtu.be/6-v1b9waHWY?t=112) was slightly anachronistic since it was released in early 2000 (and it's really weird to see the idealized hires vector graphics reto-re-rendering of a lores pixelated game), but the dancing baby was spot on. The dancing baby (https://youtu.be/6-v1b9waHWY?t=124 https://youtu.be/6-v1b9waHWY?t=124) was from a demo that shipped with 3D Studio Max's "Character Studio / Bipid / Physique" character animation and skinning system, which we used to make the character animation in The Sims. The baby and its dancing animations were included with Character Studio as a canned demo, along with some other animations you could apply to any skeleton. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_baby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_baby
doctorhandshake 2y ago
I remember the sounds so much better than the tools. I still can hear perfectly every slice of the exquisite corpse ‘draw me’ feature: “I’m a … beautiful fairy princess … with a hundred toes and a pickle in my nose … and … I’m covered with feathers!!”
dd367 2y ago
Kid Pix seems like not an astute name.
- DANmode 2y ago
  This software was named decades and decades ago - long before all of that was a mainstream topic.
  - nicolas_t 2y ago
    Sorry, what mainstream topic would make kid pix not astute?
    - DANmode 2y ago
      Pedophiles hiding in plain sight. Some incredibly powerful.
  - irusensei 2y ago
    Long before social media people looking for outrage in simple things.
jjice 2y ago
The audio is the biggest memory blast for me. That low quality flash-style audio is just so nostalgic. Does anyone know what specifically causes that? Is that just due to audio codecs at the time?
- chefandy 2y ago
  I don't know exactly how the kidpix sounds were programmed, but I'll bet flash was light-years beyond it. Flash used wav, QuickTime, real Media, and other audio files that were probably made using a DAW or real instruments like they are today, dropped into a wysiwyg Editor. They were usually highly compressed so they could be usable to people on slow dial-up connections which is where that crunchiness comes. In a lot of earlier applications with sound, such as games, the sounds were programmed in assembly using tone and noise generators. It was super fast and lightweight, but obviously one of the first older techniques to get left behind when it was feasible.
  - chefandy 2y ago
    (random thought that popped into my head that might be interesting if you like this stuff-- there are lots of gui options for making tones and noise and I personally think it's super fun to explore these sounds.)
- ssl-3 2y ago
  AFAICT, Kid Pix was first released as public domain in 1989, and published a year or two later by Broderbund. We don't think much about it these days when buying and using a quarter-terabyte MicroSD card is rather passe, and when we can buy a complete USB sound card for ~$5 at Wal-Mart (we call it a "USB C headphone adapter" and it acts just like we'd expect a dumb adapter to act, but it's got the whole works integrated completely inside of the connector shell -- ADC, DAC, power amp, ...). Back then, audio was... problematic. It was unwieldy. At 16-bit stereo 44.1KHz ("CD quality"), a 5.25" double-density disk can hold less than two seconds of audio, and we didn't have the computational grunt for perceptive codecs like MP3. So we just used less of it: We sampled with fewer bits, and we did so less-often. A combination of low sample rate and primitive ADC implementations with not-so-good Nyquist filtering and other issues lead to both a chopped off top end, and a mess of sampling artifacts in an easily-audible range. A low sample depth lead to analog sounds being recorded as hot as possible -- often with deliberate clipping -- lest there be even fewer bits to contain the important parts of the sounds. Some of this could be mitigated with high-quality dynamic range compression, but good outboard compressors were expensive (and so were the 16-bit workflows that would allow that to be done digitally in software). It was a sea of tradeoffs. Further digital processing also had a bad effect on stuff (quantization errors, oh my!) -- somewhat akin to doing things like trying to scale the resolution of ASCII art. And even then, sometimes the audio was too big. So we'd truncate samples by just chopping off LSBs until the sounds were barely-useful even in a chonky fun drawing program (the original disksets from the SoundBlaster card came with "compression" software that did exactly this), just to make things a wee bit smaller because storage was relatively tiny. This was how we got the sounds of the early-ish days of PCM audio on home computers, and much of that carried on into the early flash days (due to bandwidth constraints, not so much storage; CD-ROMs had broadly fixed the storage problem for commercially-published software by then).
elijahbenizzy 2y ago
Oh my god I barely even remembered this until the sound + the name popped right back. Wow!
amatecha 2y ago
Recently I found one of my old elementary school projects from ~1995 or so, where we had to make our own magazine, and my friend/classmate and I made a computer gaming magazine. We used Kid Pix to draw a side view of our own imagined Command & Conquer scene to act as a "screenshot" in our article about the game. Since the Mac lab at school had a color printer (the ImageWriter II, I think), we were able to make some pretty neat pages for our magazine! Fun memories :) Oh, actually I think I found the floppy disk that had that very Kid Pix document on it, now that I think of it! Probably one of the oldest of my creations that I still have.
- amatecha 2y ago
  Sweet, found the files I backed up off the old floppies a while back. Here's the most ambitious thing I ever made in Kid Pix, for the made-up Command & Conquer "game screenshot" in our "make a magazine" assignment! I believe it was in 1994 or 1995, on a Color Classic (as that is what our computer lab had a ton of at the time). This was a lot of work for a 9 or 10 year old! haha https://matecha.net/cnc-kidpix-amatecha-1995.gif https://matecha.net/cnc-kidpix-amatecha-1995.gif
hellodang_ 2y ago
[dead]
gaurangagg 2y ago
So amazing. I remember we used to go to our school's computer lab in ~1999 when we used to draw on Kidpix. And I vividly remember the Firecracker feature with nice bomb sound. You have left me nostalgiac :)
esalman 2y ago
My 3 yo just had a lot of fun with it, helped him draw robots and stuff.
softgrow 2y ago
https://tuxpaint.org https://tuxpaint.org TuxPaint is an app that is very similar from 2002 onwards to current. I have been installing on many computers for small children since. Stamps and noises are the most loved features.
- bagful 2y ago
  TuxPaint is just as fun for adult artists, especially using a stylus touchscreen. The Magic tools have unique digital-grunge effects that a more respectable paint program won’t have (my favorite is Chalk). I only recommend replacing the stock colors with something like Dawnbringer’s 16- or 32-color palette.
darepublic 2y ago
as a kid, when we behaved well in computer lab, we got to play with this.
BobFromEnzyte 2y ago
Ah heck yes! This was a great part of elementary school!
alisinabh 2y ago
I was again 5 years old for a few minutes after clicking on this. Thanks OP. That brought back a lot of good memories.
DonHopkins 2y ago
Holy plate of shrimp! I just ran across this recent blog post about the earlier interview yesterday: Inspiration: Meeting Mr. Kid Pix: https://garden.grantcuster.com/2024-06-16-19-33-19-Inspiration-Meeting-Mr-Kid-Pix/ https://garden.grantcuster.com/2024-06-16-19-33-19-Inspirati... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csalhuSixQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csalhuSixQU >Grant's garden >Sunday · Jun 16, 2024 · 7:33 PM >I really enjoyed Meeting Mr. Kid Pix by jeffrey aka Whistlegraph on Twitter. I appreciated the sincerity of both him and Craig Hickman. So nice to see people putting effort to understand + be understood. >This does touch on something I've tried to nail down before in regard to creative tools and video games. >If Kid Pix is so delightful (it is) what does it mean that it is a delightful paint program? Rather than a delightful video game? >Even if the produced image isn't the point, that you're manipulating an image is some part of it. That you see images all around you and now you're enjoying making them. It's got to be (I think) something to do with feeling agency. Video games give you agency too, but with a closed world (that's oversimplifying). >I can't fully articulate it! But it seems useful to keep returning to.
ascorbic 2y ago
This isn't just good for nostalgia. My 10 year old has really enjoyed playing with it for years now. She hadn't even realised it was so old until I told her recently. Stuff like Stardew Valley means kids are used to the 8-bit style and don't think of it as a signifier of old games.
- boringg 2y ago
  Goes to show how much graphics aren't the deciding factor in fun games for kids - or rather they aren't even that huge a deal.
- drowntoge 2y ago
  Yeah. It's truly amazing how cleverly they designed these tools to encourage discovery and experimentation. It's made to make it basically impossible to create something that "doesn't look right", which makes it a fantastic creativity toy for children. It makes me a bit sad that it's not easy to find anything today that can compete with what I played with as a kid thirty years ago.
  - indymike 2y ago
    > It makes me a bit sad that it's not easy to find anything today that can compete with what I played with as a kid thirty years ago. My wife is a teacher. I came home from work and she was making Google slides and the stock art was just like KidPix. I suspect that Google slides is the spiritual successor, but it just isn't as fun. > It makes me a bit sad that it's not easy to find anything today that can compete with what I played with as a kid thirty years ago. My kids are always shocked when I dig up some old software that does X or Y that they would otherwise need the pro enterprise AI plus subscription to use through the browser.
MoD411 2y ago
not gonna lie, this title sounds a bit pedofilic
- krallja 2y ago
  All my friend group chats have a #kidpix channel for sharing pics of our kids. It’s named after the historic software.
DonHopkins 2y ago
Not to diminish the groundbreaking originality KidPix (1989), but rather to highlight something from a few years later in the same vein that it might have inspired, I also love the Thinkin' Things series from Edmark (1993): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinkin%27_Things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinkin%27_Things >Thinkin' Things is a series of educational video games by the Edmark Corporation and released for Windows and Mac in the 1990s. Entries in the series include Thinkin' Things Collection 1 (Formerly Thinkin Things) (1993), Thinkin' Things Collection 2 (1994), Thinkin' Things Collection 3 (1995), the adventure game Thinkin' Things: Sky Island Mysteries (1998), Thinkin’ Things Galactic Brain Benders (1999), Thinkin' Things: All Around Frippletown (1999) and Thinkin' Things: Toony the Loon's Lagoon (1999). >The Thinkin' Things series allows players to experiment and explore with interactive objects in different ways and methods throughout the games. This can be in the form of playing with shapes, patterns, motions, sound effects and music tunes. Every game has its own preset designs and demonstrations to give the player an idea of how the game works before the player can customize a design of their own. Some games also permit the player to record their own sounds with a microphone. History of KidPix is interesting too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kid_Pix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kid_Pix Thinkin' Things Collection 1 Gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rszh-Pq-mpw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rszh-Pq-mpw Especially the mesmerizing bouncing balls: https://youtu.be/Rszh-Pq-mpw?t=629 https://youtu.be/Rszh-Pq-mpw?t=629 Thinkin' Things Collection 2 Gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2Sh5pxLSlA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2Sh5pxLSlA Thinkin' Things Collection 3 Gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCFNUc10Vu8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCFNUc10Vu8 Alan Kay also loves Thinkin' Things (as well as Warren Robinett's "Rocky's Boots" and "Robot Odyssey", the same guy who made Atari Adventure), and cited one of its levels, a football halftime parade programming system, as a precursor to blocks-based visual programming: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17423040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17423040 DonHopkins on June 29, 2018 | parent | context | favorite | on: Classic 1984 video game Robot Odyssey available on... From: Alan Kay Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2007 13:55:27 -0800 (PST) Subject: Re: Just curious ... To: Samuel Klein, Don Hopkins, Chris Trottier, John Gilmore Hi SJ -- Robot Odyssey is another game that would benefit from having a clean separation between the graphical/physical modeling simulation and the behavioral parts (both the games levels and the robot programming could be independently separated out) -- this would make a great target for those who would like to try their hand at game play and at robot behavioral programming systems. This is a long undropped shoe for me. When I was the CS at Atari in 82-84, it was one of our goals to make a number of the very best games into frameworks for end-user (especially children's) creativity. Alas, Atari had quite a down turn towards the end of 83 ... We did get "the Aquarium" idea from Ann Marion to morph into the Vivarium project at Apple ... And some of the results there helped with the later Etoys design. Cheers, Alan ---- From: Alan Kay Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2007 20:57:51 -0600 (CST) Subject: Re: Just curious ... To: Samuel Klein, Don Hopkins, Chris Trottier, John Gilmore Thanks SJ -- We are benefiting here from Don Hopkins' generosity (and of the original designers and owners of these games). The basic notion is that there are many games that, if modularized with nice separable interfaces, would be great environments for exploring various kinds of "learning by doing". For example, there is a nice separation between the "rules/dynamics" of a games world and the "strategies/actions" of the characters. There could be a third separation to break out the graphics and sound routines as a media environment. For example, in SimCity, the first and most useful breakout for children would be to allow various UIs to be made that would let children find out about and try experiments with the "city dynamics rules". It's not clear what the best forms for this would be, so it would be great to have a variety of different designers supply modules that would try to bridge the gaps to the child users. This could work even for pretty young children (we helped the Open Magnet School set up Doreen Nelson's "City Building" curriculum in the third grade of the school and this was very successful -- a child controlled SimCity would have been wonderful to have). Maybe this separation could be set up via the D-bus so that separate processes written in any language the authors choose could be used. This would open this game up to different experiments by different researchers to explore different kinds of UIs and strategy languages for various ages of children. I think this would be really cool! We would all learn a lot from this and the children would benefit greatly. A trickier deal would be the world dynamics (I'm just guessing here, but Don would know). This is one of the really great things about SimCity -- it can really accommodate lots of different changes and stitch things together to make a pretty decent simulation without too many seams showing. (Given the machines this game originally ran on, many of the heuristics are likely to be a little patchy. Don has indicated as much.) I think doing a great world dynamics engine for games like SimCity would be really wonderful -- and could even be a thesis project or two. Don has talked about doing the separations so that many new games can be made in addition to the variations. Similarly, Robot Odyssey (one of the best games concepts ever) was marred by choosing a way to program the robots where the complexity of programming grew much faster than the functionality that could be given to the robots. This game was way ahead of its time. Again, the idea would be do make a game in which environment, levels of challenge, and how the robots are programmed would be broken out into separate processes that a variety of gamers and researchers could do experiments in language and UI. One of the most wonderful possibilities about this venture is that it will bring together very fluent designers from many worlds of computing (more worlds than usually combine to make a game) in the service of the children. We should really try to pull this off! Cheers, Alan pjungwir on June 29, 2018 | root | parent | next [–] Does anyone here remember ZZT? I loved building puzzles in that game with the scripting language. You didn't program to play, but you could make your own games and program the behavior of special objects. It's the closest realized example I can think of to what Alan described here. jasonjayr on June 29, 2018 | root | parent | next [–] I remember ZZT -- and the excitement when I found an archive of alternate worlds I could download from a BBS. Learning to program ZZT worlds was one of the first steps I took to programming. DonHopkins on June 29, 2018 | root | parent | prev | next [–] I'm not familiar with ZZT, but here's a reference to another game that inspired Alan Kay, called "Thinkin' Things", in a discussion about the Snap! visual programming language! https://snap.berkeley.edu https://snap.berkeley.edu ---- From: Alan Kay Date: Thu, 3 May 2018 07:49:16 +0000 (UTC) Subject: Re: Blocky + Micropolis = Blockropolis! ;) Yes, all of these "blocks" editors sprouted from the original one I designed for Etoys* more than 20 years ago now -- most of the followup was by way of Jens Moenig -- who did SNAP. You can see Etoys demoed on the OLPC in my 2007 TED talk. I'd advise coming up with a special kid's oriented language for your SimCity/Metropolis system and then render it in "blocks". Cheers Alan ------------- * Two precursors for DnD programming were in my grad student's -- Mike Travers -- MIT thesis (not quite the same idea), and in the "Thinking Things" parade programming system (again, just individual symbol blocks rather than expressions). ---- From: Don Hopkins Date: Fri, 4 May 2018 00:43:56 +0200 Subject: Re: Blocky + Micropolis = Blockropolis! ;) I love fondly remember and love Thinkin’ Things 1, but I never saw the subsequent versions! But there’s a great demo on youtube! https://youtu.be/gCFNUc10Vu8?t=24m58s https://youtu.be/gCFNUc10Vu8?t=24m58s That would be a great way to program SimCity builder “agents” like the bulldozer and road layer, as well as agents like PacMan who know how to follow roads and eat traffic! I am trying to get my head around Snap by playing around with it and watching Jens’s youtube videos, and it’s dawning on me that that it’s full blown undiluted Scheme with continuations and visual macros plus the best ideas of Squeak! The concept of putting a “ring” around blocks to make them a first class function, and being able to define your own custom blocks that take bodies of block code as parameters like real Lisp macros is brilliant! That is what I’ve been dreaming about and wondering how to do for so long! Looks like he nailed it! ;) Here’s something I found that you wrote about tile programming six years ago. -Don Squeak-dev: http://squeak-dev.squeakfoundation.narkive.com/7ZN0H3vt/etoys-alice-and-tile-programming http://squeak-dev.squeakfoundation.narkive.com/7ZN0H3vt/etoy... Etoys, Alice and tile programming ajbn at cin.ufpe.br () 6 years ago Folks, I have been trying the new version of Alice <www.alice.org>. It also uses tile programming like Etoys. Just for curiosity, does anyone know the history of Tile Programming? TIA, Antonio Barros PhD Student Informatics Center Federal University of Pernambuco Brazil Alan Kay 6 years ago This particular strand starting with one of the projects I saw in the CDROM "Thinking Things" (I think it was the 3rd in the set). This project was basically about being able to march around a football field and the multiple marchers were controlled by a very simple tile based programming system. Also, a grad student from a number of years ago, Mike Travers, did a really excellent thesis at MIT about enduser programming of autonomous agents -- the system was called AGAR -- and many of these ideas were used in the Vivarium project at Apple 15 years ago. The thesis version of AGAR used DnD tiles to make programs in Mike's very powerful system. The etoys originated as a design I did to make a nice constructive environment for the internet -- the Disney Family.com site -- in which small projects could make by parents and kids working together. SqC made the etoys ideas work, and Kim Rose and teacher BJ Conn decided to see how they would work in a classroom. I thought the etoys lacked too many features to be really good in a classroom, but I was wrong. The small number of features and the ease of use turned out to be real virtues. We've been friends with Randy Pausch for a long time and have had a number of outstanding interns from his group at CMU over the years. For example, Jeff Pierce (now a prof at GaTech) did SqueakAlice working with Andreas Raab to tie it to Andreas' Balloon3D. Randy's group got interested in the etoys tile scripting and did a very nice variant (it's rather different from etoys, and maybe better). Cheers, Alan Mike Travers Portfolio: AGAR Ant World: https://hyperphor.com/portfolio/ant-world-illo.gif https://hyperphor.com/portfolio/ant-world-illo.gif Ant Agent Graph: https://hyperphor.com/portfolio/agent-graph-illo.gif https://hyperphor.com/portfolio/agent-graph-illo.gif Brainworks: https://hyperphor.com/portfolio/brainworks.jpg https://hyperphor.com/portfolio/brainworks.jpg Agar: An Animal Construction Kid (Mike Travers' thesis, supervised by Marvin Minsky): https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/78088 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/78088 https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/78088/20084240-MIT.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/78088/2008424...
makach 2y ago
The sound effects are everything!
odysseus 2y ago
Just bought the iPad version. I am so excited to show my kids this when I get home from work tomorrow. They are going to be ecstatic. The sounds bring back so many great memories.
odysseus 2y ago
A couple of videos featuring Craig Hickman, creator of KidPix: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9yIOJow7oo&pp=ygUUY3JhaWcgaGlja21hbiBraWRwaXg%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9yIOJow7oo&pp=ygUUY3JhaWcgaGl... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LqVhK6JgbSU&pp=ygUUY3JhaWcgaGlja21hbiBraWRwaXg%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LqVhK6JgbSU&pp=ygUUY3JhaWcgaGl... His enthusiasm is contagious!
pewu 2y ago
Does anyone else remember the clone Art for Kids for Atari [1], or more specifically, it's Polish version for Windows, Zostań Małym Picasso? There's no screenshot I could find of the latter, but looked exactly like the Atari clone. Now, KidPix unlocked tons of memories, have never played it, but TIL it's the original. [1] https://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-st-art-for-kids_28718.html https://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-st-art-for-kids_28718....
iamtedd 2y ago
If this is a clean-room re implementation, why are the original sound and graphics assets included in this GPL-licensed software?
vsgherzi 2y ago
my first "game" ever i had countless hours. Insane that we never got an equivalent for kids again
jyooi93 2y ago
Omg, this is the drawing tool I used in my primary school computer class; what a good old day!
overflyer 2y ago
Really nice project thanks. But I really really would reconsider the naming :D
- Ylpertnodi 2y ago
  Agree. That was not an easy click.
medhir 2y ago
at first I was shocked by the noise, but then the whole experience brought me back to 90s era computer games I played as a kid. very cool
furyg3 2y ago
At my elementary / Jr high school we had one Apple II in each classroom, which was fun to play Oregon trail and number munchers on. The 'computer lab' had a bunch of IIgs (color! woo!) and Macs, allowing one class at a time to come in for an hour or so. Usually it was Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, ClarisWorks (word), some LOGO programming application, and KidPix. KidPix was the big hit, it got everyone into the joy of computing, it tought kids how to save files, use disks, make copies, and it kept the ImageWriter color dot matrix printer buzzing for the whole hour. The "oh no" undo sound gives me so much joy. Thanks to whoever did this.
vmfunction 2y ago
Wow! When will beautiful doreena be ported? It is one of those software need to run quite old MacOS to work.
dangoodmanUT 2y ago
where's the music
Liftyee 2y ago
Reminds me of the hours I spent messing around on Tux Paint. For some reason, the canvas is rendering to the right of the top toolbar instead of below it (Firefox stable).
jackplug 2y ago
[flagged]
amaccuish 2y ago
Strong RM Colour Paint and RM Talking First Word from the UK vibes, love it. https://i.redd.it/0ivv3h2nkcj41.png https://i.redd.it/0ivv3h2nkcj41.png
TedDoesntTalk 2y ago
How I clear the screen to start new?
- knocknock 2y ago
  I selected the Eraser from the left menu and then selected Firecracker from the top menu.
kidpicked 2y ago
Is there a way to adjust the canvas size? The workable area stretches beyond my laptop screen and I have to scroll... some of the tools work slower doing their patterns when the canvas is this large. (I'm on Firefox's latest release, I've whitelisted their JS in noscript and even tried opening a private browsing window where uBlock is disabled in case some of the privacy stuff is interfering w/ rendering) But other than that cool work, it's really bringing me back to elementary/early middle school days... I wish I had some of the abstract art I'd create sitting waiting for the bus, but alongside sim cities and old essays it's gone with the (digital) wind...
3guk 2y ago
Wow what a trip down memory lane - I was obsessed with this as a child ! The sounds of each tool instantly transport me back !
jacobgkau 2y ago
That's neat! Although the first version was before my time. I had Kid Pix Deluxe 3 in elementary school, and eventually got my family to get it. Had to run it on our Windows ME computer since it crashed trying to run it on XP. (Crazy story how we even got a copy... I used to go and stare at the product page for Kid Pix Deluxe 3X, a remastered version for Mac, since it was the closest thing I could find to a source for the one I knew of. One day, my parents got an email from some company offering the original Deluxe 3 version for something like $40. Looking back on it, I have no clue how they got my parents' email address or if they were in any way associated with Brøderbund, and it was probably unsafe to give them payment info... but we actually got the software and I don't think the credit card was ever abused, so all's well that ends well.)
darajava 2y ago
Similar to: https://jspaint.app/ https://jspaint.app/

921 points by wonger_ 2y ago

k310 2y ago

Is there any survival or revival of "Gizmos & Gadgets"? [0] It was a very cool simulation game for various STEM topics, including: • Balance – balancing a scale using different weights and distances • Electricity – constructing various types of series and parallel circuits • Energy – matching activities to energy types: chemical, electrical, kinetic, nuclear, potential, light, heat, mechanical • Force – propelling various sized objects into a flashing hole (depending on ramp, gravity and/or friction) • Gears – constructing machines using gears of various sizes • Magnetics – constructing various north–south pole patterns • Machines – building common objects out of simple machine pieces My daughter enjoyed it. (though she didn't go into science) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gizmos_%26_Gadgets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gizmos_%26_Gadgets!

letmevoteplease 2y ago

I can't figure out how to clear the canvas.

pcwalton 2y ago
Eraser tool, dynamite, click anywhere.

relyks 2y ago

This is amazing and brings back good memories. I spent a good portion of my childhood playing with KidPix on a Performa 600 lol

wildzzz 2y ago
We had a brand new lab filled with Performa 5400s loaded up with kidpix in elementary school
cortesoft 2y ago
The LC for me

georgel 2y ago

The dynamite brings back memories.

beardedwizard 2y ago
that's what got me too
jszymborski 2y ago
Same! Didn't realize this is what I played with as a kid until that moment.

nickpeterson 2y ago

This is the kind of app I want on an iPad for my kid.

foenix 2y ago
You're in luck! I my kiddo loves the kidpix iPad app and it's just a single purchase.
- dontdoxxme 2y ago
  This web version supports adding to the home screen and you maybe won’t even notice the difference.
- xiconfjs 2y ago
  Can you provide a link to the iPad app, please?
  - foenix 2y ago
    Sure thing: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kid-pix-5-the-steam-edition/id1249381439 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kid-pix-5-the-steam-edition/id...
    - colinbartlett 2y ago
      Huh, what am I missing? This looks absolutely nothing like the link from OP.
      - foenix 2y ago
        So, sometimes software gets these things called "iterations" and "versions" where the authors of the software add features and updates. So while this link isn't the KidPix of the 90s, it certainly has the same gameplay to the point where Im personally transported back to playing this on my Dad's Mactinosh 30ish years ago. Perhaps you can try downloading it and seeing for yourself?
    - 2y ago

footlose_3815 2y ago

Man, I used to spend hours on KidPix back on my old 68k mac. It's not quite the same, and a lot of the effects are not 1:1, but it's still a cool throwback.

Neywiny 2y ago

Maybe a few months ago I got a real hankering for the sounds of KidPix. The theme song is 100% pure lab grade nostalgia for me. Pretty sure I never used the program to its full extent but I loved the funny sound effects. [Editing because I commented before clicking the link. Seems this is some older version. I only used a newer one.]

duskwuff 2y ago
I don't remember a theme song from the version of my childhood, but I vividly remember the OH NO! of the undo button (which is, delightfully, included in the web version).
- Neywiny 2y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMCbnEGGL4E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMCbnEGGL4E I remember the first part to this so well. Wondering if maybe I skipped the rest or I just forgot it. The "wow" is burned into my memory. But as I alluded to in my edit, this seems to be an entirely different generation of product I'm remembering vs this post.
Gigachad 2y ago
I used to use kidpix 4 as a kid and recently went and set up a windows XP VM to try it again. Turns out I pretty much was using it to its full extent by just making a mess and blowing stuff up. It’s pretty much impossible to create anything artistic in the program. The lack of layers, zoom, and only one level of undo make it extremely difficult. I have somewhat good drawing skills but wasn’t able to do anything more than a very crude stick figure. Still had a lot of fun doing that though.
- Neywiny 2y ago
  In a way I appreciate knowing that I didn't miss out on much. I vaguely recall something about animation though? Other than that, I guess that's what I remember too. Just splattering stuff on the screen to hear the funny noises and making nightmare drawings. I'm sure my parents still have some printouts. I recall a bowling ball and pin brush I liked.

melaniecrissey 2y ago

The paint bucket sound makes my heart so happy!

gjsman-1000 2y ago

Believe it or not, there is a Kid Pix 5.0, and it even runs natively on Apple Silicon Macs. Inexplicably though, the company that develops it refuses to advertise it. Maybe it has something to do with their school contracts. You can grab a copy on Internet Archive though. https://youtu.be/ZbB1OuOxUr4?t=64 https://youtu.be/ZbB1OuOxUr4?t=64 https://www.mackiev.com/offers/kp5/upgrade_offer.html https://www.mackiev.com/offers/kp5/upgrade_offer.html

xattt 2y ago
There is an iOS/iPad OS version! It’s a killer app for kids.

fswd 2y ago

like something I'd use on my amiga 500 when I was a kid!

keithnz 2y ago

This is pretty cool! My kids are past this now, but they used to enjoy TuxPaint, that's pretty good also.

LarsDu88 2y ago

What the hell? I grew up with this

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Some previous discussion in 2021: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073383

dang 2y ago
Thanks! Macroexpanded: Kid Pix as a JavaScript App - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28073383 - Aug 2021 (89 comments) Kid Pix in JavaScript/HTML - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28069588 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28069588 - Aug 2021 (12 comments) Show HN: JS Kid Pix 1.0.2021 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28064606 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28064606 - Aug 2021 (1 comment) Meeting Mr. Kid Pix (2019) [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25108875 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25108875 - Nov 2020 (16 comments) Meeting Mr. Kid Pix - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20296370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20296370 - June 2019 (2 comments) Kid Pix – The Early Years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11438994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11438994 - April 2016 (1 comment) Kid Pix: The Early Years - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1298728 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1298728 - April 2010 (3 comments)
- SushiHippie 2y ago
  Archive of the Kid Pix: The Early Years page https://web.archive.org/web/20120427215910/http://pixelpoppin.com/kidpix/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120427215910/http://pixelpoppi...

Nition 2y ago

Really cool, I remember using this on a friend's computer in the early 90s. My only complaint is this has a smoothing alpha edge on the pencil and line tools, which gives that unfortunate white outline when using the paint bucket. KidPix is great, but gimmie that classic Nearest Neighbour behaviour.

yincrash 2y ago
https://github.com/vikrum/kidpix/issues/16 https://github.com/vikrum/kidpix/issues/16 It appears because the underlying HTML5 Canvas tools are being used, things like antialiasing are unavoidable without remaking certain API calls. I'm sure it could be done though!
- smusamashah 2y ago
  I think that can be turned off. I tried that recently. There is a global flag we can set to turn of antialiasing. UPDATE: it's image-rendering: pixelated; https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/image-rendering https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/image-rende...
  - smusamashah 2y ago
    This property is already applied if you inspect the canvas elements. Better solution could be context SVG filters https://stackoverflow.com/a/49357655/342095 https://stackoverflow.com/a/49357655/342095 https://stackoverflow.com/a/68372384/342095 https://stackoverflow.com/a/68372384/342095
  - whywhywhywhy 2y ago
    This rabbit hole is a waste of time, as someone who's been down it, you'll find piles of resources claiming CSS and JS flags will give you what you want but it never really gets there. The only way to actually get true aliased brushes in canvas is implementing a line drawing algorithm manually and drawing down aliased circles like how https://gifpaint.com/ https://gifpaint.com/ & https://jspaint.app/ https://jspaint.app/ do it.

mechagodzilla 2y ago

My 6 year old loves kidpix 3 on an old PPC iMac. It was just a great piece of software.

globalnode 2y ago

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globalnode 2y ago
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nhance 2y ago

Wish this had the fun pack

slicktux 2y ago

This was so much fun in elementary school. I still remember going from Oregon trail on the old desktop towers to Kid Pix on the new Apple IMac G3…

amatecha 2y ago
Nice, we had it on Color Classics and uhh, I guess SE's or something (hard to remember)... such small screens haha :'D

ericd 2y ago

The original works great on dosbox, too, for all of you looking for the original experience.

jnaina 2y ago

Craig Hickman was my Prof at UofO. Took his Digital Arts class in 1986 for one quarter and wrote an early proto color paint program inspired by MacPaint, on a Graphics Frame Store system that uses serial port to communicate with a Mac 128K. The system had basic graphics primitives built-in and the system drew the images based on the commands received. Forgot the name of said graphics frame store, which if I recall had 8-bit color and had "Vector" as part of it's name (though it uses raster CRT with bit maps and not vector displays). Craig was an early pioneer in using computer color graphics for Art.

jnaina 2y ago
Found it. It was the Vectrix VX128 (the 8-bit colour model). The ad from Byte magazine below. http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/vectrix/Vectrix_Ad_Byte_Jun83.jpg http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/vectrix/Vectrix_Ad_By...
Anon4Now 2y ago
You might enjoy this, then: http://red-green-blue.com/kid-pix-the-early-years http://red-green-blue.com/kid-pix-the-early-years
- jnaina 2y ago
  Nice. Thank you. Craig is a wonderful and generous guy, and a great teacher/professor. He noticed that I was looking to learn as much as I can about graphics programming (I was doing Comp Sci) and gave me access to some neat toys, including an Apollo Domain.
  - vikrum 2y ago
    The web app somehow made its way to him! He sent me an extremely endearing message that it was fun to see his 2yo grandson using it! (Craig had originally made Kid Pix for his son who is now a graphic, ui, and ux designer). I let him know I made this port for my own daughter as a pandemic-project.

sgwizdak 2y ago

Give me text boxes and arrow connects and I'll be happy to use this for system diagrams.

makmanalp 2y ago

I don't know why but the sounds make it so much more satisfying :-) It's as fun as I remember it being as a kid.

rlt 2y ago
Ooops. Oh No. Boing. Ooops. Oh No. Oh No. Boing.
leokennis 2y ago
The "Moving Van" is just fantastic. Vrooom and then a break screech when you let it go.

hedora 2y ago

It's a little confusing that it says Public Domain Version, but it's GPLv3.

dankwizard 2y ago

I like how this gets "Wow, I grew up with this", or "I remember this!" Well... Yeah. If you're of the age, there wasn't an app store and 5000 different apps doing the same thing. There was kidpix. We all saw it. You're not special (Except me, I used KidPix the most! More than you guys!!)

maxbond 2y ago
What I see is people enjoying that they all remember the same thing, not claiming they are atomic or special. (Not that I see why people feeling special would be a problem, anyway.)
- cjbgkagh 2y ago
  I saw the comment as a tong-in-cheek reminder that culture used to be a lot less fragmented.
  - maxbond 2y ago
    Looks to me like they said both.
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nubinetwork 2y ago
Wooooooow!

SK777 2y ago

Cool app but not a great name

smugma 2y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kid_Pix https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kid_Pix

erkt 2y ago

These sounds effects are unlocking DEEEP memories. Thank you for sharing!

gnatman 2y ago
It's incredible, really. I haven't heard these in 25+ years and yet recognize them immediately. Probably because I heard them repeated 50 million times!
mlekoszek 2y ago
I always wondered how I knew what a line sounded like.

holtkam2 2y ago

Love it. I'm curious, anyone know how this was implemented? Is it a webassembly port of the original kidpix code or did he code it up from scratch via JS?

SuperHeavy256 2y ago
you can look at the project's github and understand https://github.com/vikrum/kidpix https://github.com/vikrum/kidpix

metadat 2y ago

Too bad it's totally fucked up on android mobile, I'm stuck in the top left quartile. This has all the 90s vibes which I absolutely ADORE! Awesome sounds and UX. The nostalgia is almost too much, it was a uniquely raw and badass time to be a kid in the 90s. "1999" by Charli XCX comes to mind. https://youtube.com/watch?v=6-v1b9waHWY https://youtube.com/watch?v=6-v1b9waHWY Some things are invariably lost to time. <3

maxbond 2y ago
The visual references in that video were great. The Steve Jobs took me by surprise, I thought of tech titans being culturally relevant was a distinctly recent phenomenon, but of course 99 was the peak of the dot-com bubble and Apple was huge already.
- DonHopkins 2y ago
  The Sims reference (https://youtu.be/6-v1b9waHWY?t=112 https://youtu.be/6-v1b9waHWY?t=112) was slightly anachronistic since it was released in early 2000 (and it's really weird to see the idealized hires vector graphics reto-re-rendering of a lores pixelated game), but the dancing baby was spot on. The dancing baby (https://youtu.be/6-v1b9waHWY?t=124 https://youtu.be/6-v1b9waHWY?t=124) was from a demo that shipped with 3D Studio Max's "Character Studio / Bipid / Physique" character animation and skinning system, which we used to make the character animation in The Sims. The baby and its dancing animations were included with Character Studio as a canned demo, along with some other animations you could apply to any skeleton. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_baby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_baby

doctorhandshake 2y ago

I remember the sounds so much better than the tools. I still can hear perfectly every slice of the exquisite corpse ‘draw me’ feature: “I’m a … beautiful fairy princess … with a hundred toes and a pickle in my nose … and … I’m covered with feathers!!”

dd367 2y ago

Kid Pix seems like not an astute name.

DANmode 2y ago
This software was named decades and decades ago - long before all of that was a mainstream topic.
- nicolas_t 2y ago
  Sorry, what mainstream topic would make kid pix not astute?
  - DANmode 2y ago
    Pedophiles hiding in plain sight. Some incredibly powerful.
- irusensei 2y ago
  Long before social media people looking for outrage in simple things.

jjice 2y ago

The audio is the biggest memory blast for me. That low quality flash-style audio is just so nostalgic. Does anyone know what specifically causes that? Is that just due to audio codecs at the time?

chefandy 2y ago
I don't know exactly how the kidpix sounds were programmed, but I'll bet flash was light-years beyond it. Flash used wav, QuickTime, real Media, and other audio files that were probably made using a DAW or real instruments like they are today, dropped into a wysiwyg Editor. They were usually highly compressed so they could be usable to people on slow dial-up connections which is where that crunchiness comes. In a lot of earlier applications with sound, such as games, the sounds were programmed in assembly using tone and noise generators. It was super fast and lightweight, but obviously one of the first older techniques to get left behind when it was feasible.
- chefandy 2y ago
  (random thought that popped into my head that might be interesting if you like this stuff-- there are lots of gui options for making tones and noise and I personally think it's super fun to explore these sounds.)
ssl-3 2y ago
AFAICT, Kid Pix was first released as public domain in 1989, and published a year or two later by Broderbund. We don't think much about it these days when buying and using a quarter-terabyte MicroSD card is rather passe, and when we can buy a complete USB sound card for ~$5 at Wal-Mart (we call it a "USB C headphone adapter" and it acts just like we'd expect a dumb adapter to act, but it's got the whole works integrated completely inside of the connector shell -- ADC, DAC, power amp, ...). Back then, audio was... problematic. It was unwieldy. At 16-bit stereo 44.1KHz ("CD quality"), a 5.25" double-density disk can hold less than two seconds of audio, and we didn't have the computational grunt for perceptive codecs like MP3. So we just used less of it: We sampled with fewer bits, and we did so less-often. A combination of low sample rate and primitive ADC implementations with not-so-good Nyquist filtering and other issues lead to both a chopped off top end, and a mess of sampling artifacts in an easily-audible range. A low sample depth lead to analog sounds being recorded as hot as possible -- often with deliberate clipping -- lest there be even fewer bits to contain the important parts of the sounds. Some of this could be mitigated with high-quality dynamic range compression, but good outboard compressors were expensive (and so were the 16-bit workflows that would allow that to be done digitally in software). It was a sea of tradeoffs. Further digital processing also had a bad effect on stuff (quantization errors, oh my!) -- somewhat akin to doing things like trying to scale the resolution of ASCII art. And even then, sometimes the audio was too big. So we'd truncate samples by just chopping off LSBs until the sounds were barely-useful even in a chonky fun drawing program (the original disksets from the SoundBlaster card came with "compression" software that did exactly this), just to make things a wee bit smaller because storage was relatively tiny. This was how we got the sounds of the early-ish days of PCM audio on home computers, and much of that carried on into the early flash days (due to bandwidth constraints, not so much storage; CD-ROMs had broadly fixed the storage problem for commercially-published software by then).

elijahbenizzy 2y ago

Oh my god I barely even remembered this until the sound + the name popped right back. Wow!

amatecha 2y ago

Recently I found one of my old elementary school projects from ~1995 or so, where we had to make our own magazine, and my friend/classmate and I made a computer gaming magazine. We used Kid Pix to draw a side view of our own imagined Command & Conquer scene to act as a "screenshot" in our article about the game. Since the Mac lab at school had a color printer (the ImageWriter II, I think), we were able to make some pretty neat pages for our magazine! Fun memories :) Oh, actually I think I found the floppy disk that had that very Kid Pix document on it, now that I think of it! Probably one of the oldest of my creations that I still have.

amatecha 2y ago
Sweet, found the files I backed up off the old floppies a while back. Here's the most ambitious thing I ever made in Kid Pix, for the made-up Command & Conquer "game screenshot" in our "make a magazine" assignment! I believe it was in 1994 or 1995, on a Color Classic (as that is what our computer lab had a ton of at the time). This was a lot of work for a 9 or 10 year old! haha https://matecha.net/cnc-kidpix-amatecha-1995.gif https://matecha.net/cnc-kidpix-amatecha-1995.gif

hellodang_ 2y ago

[dead]

gaurangagg 2y ago

So amazing. I remember we used to go to our school's computer lab in ~1999 when we used to draw on Kidpix. And I vividly remember the Firecracker feature with nice bomb sound. You have left me nostalgiac :)

esalman 2y ago

My 3 yo just had a lot of fun with it, helped him draw robots and stuff.

softgrow 2y ago

https://tuxpaint.org https://tuxpaint.org TuxPaint is an app that is very similar from 2002 onwards to current. I have been installing on many computers for small children since. Stamps and noises are the most loved features.

bagful 2y ago
TuxPaint is just as fun for adult artists, especially using a stylus touchscreen. The Magic tools have unique digital-grunge effects that a more respectable paint program won’t have (my favorite is Chalk). I only recommend replacing the stock colors with something like Dawnbringer’s 16- or 32-color palette.

darepublic 2y ago

as a kid, when we behaved well in computer lab, we got to play with this.

BobFromEnzyte 2y ago

Ah heck yes! This was a great part of elementary school!

alisinabh 2y ago

I was again 5 years old for a few minutes after clicking on this. Thanks OP. That brought back a lot of good memories.

DonHopkins 2y ago

Holy plate of shrimp! I just ran across this recent blog post about the earlier interview yesterday: Inspiration: Meeting Mr. Kid Pix: https://garden.grantcuster.com/2024-06-16-19-33-19-Inspiration-Meeting-Mr-Kid-Pix/ https://garden.grantcuster.com/2024-06-16-19-33-19-Inspirati... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csalhuSixQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csalhuSixQU >Grant's garden >Sunday · Jun 16, 2024 · 7:33 PM >I really enjoyed Meeting Mr. Kid Pix by jeffrey aka Whistlegraph on Twitter. I appreciated the sincerity of both him and Craig Hickman. So nice to see people putting effort to understand + be understood. >This does touch on something I've tried to nail down before in regard to creative tools and video games. >If Kid Pix is so delightful (it is) what does it mean that it is a delightful paint program? Rather than a delightful video game? >Even if the produced image isn't the point, that you're manipulating an image is some part of it. That you see images all around you and now you're enjoying making them. It's got to be (I think) something to do with feeling agency. Video games give you agency too, but with a closed world (that's oversimplifying). >I can't fully articulate it! But it seems useful to keep returning to.

ascorbic 2y ago

This isn't just good for nostalgia. My 10 year old has really enjoyed playing with it for years now. She hadn't even realised it was so old until I told her recently. Stuff like Stardew Valley means kids are used to the 8-bit style and don't think of it as a signifier of old games.

boringg 2y ago
Goes to show how much graphics aren't the deciding factor in fun games for kids - or rather they aren't even that huge a deal.
drowntoge 2y ago
Yeah. It's truly amazing how cleverly they designed these tools to encourage discovery and experimentation. It's made to make it basically impossible to create something that "doesn't look right", which makes it a fantastic creativity toy for children. It makes me a bit sad that it's not easy to find anything today that can compete with what I played with as a kid thirty years ago.
- indymike 2y ago
  > It makes me a bit sad that it's not easy to find anything today that can compete with what I played with as a kid thirty years ago. My wife is a teacher. I came home from work and she was making Google slides and the stock art was just like KidPix. I suspect that Google slides is the spiritual successor, but it just isn't as fun. > It makes me a bit sad that it's not easy to find anything today that can compete with what I played with as a kid thirty years ago. My kids are always shocked when I dig up some old software that does X or Y that they would otherwise need the pro enterprise AI plus subscription to use through the browser.

MoD411 2y ago

not gonna lie, this title sounds a bit pedofilic

krallja 2y ago
All my friend group chats have a #kidpix channel for sharing pics of our kids. It’s named after the historic software.

DonHopkins 2y ago

Not to diminish the groundbreaking originality KidPix (1989), but rather to highlight something from a few years later in the same vein that it might have inspired, I also love the Thinkin' Things series from Edmark (1993): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinkin%27_Things https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinkin%27_Things >Thinkin' Things is a series of educational video games by the Edmark Corporation and released for Windows and Mac in the 1990s. Entries in the series include Thinkin' Things Collection 1 (Formerly Thinkin Things) (1993), Thinkin' Things Collection 2 (1994), Thinkin' Things Collection 3 (1995), the adventure game Thinkin' Things: Sky Island Mysteries (1998), Thinkin’ Things Galactic Brain Benders (1999), Thinkin' Things: All Around Frippletown (1999) and Thinkin' Things: Toony the Loon's Lagoon (1999). >The Thinkin' Things series allows players to experiment and explore with interactive objects in different ways and methods throughout the games. This can be in the form of playing with shapes, patterns, motions, sound effects and music tunes. Every game has its own preset designs and demonstrations to give the player an idea of how the game works before the player can customize a design of their own. Some games also permit the player to record their own sounds with a microphone. History of KidPix is interesting too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kid_Pix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kid_Pix Thinkin' Things Collection 1 Gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rszh-Pq-mpw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rszh-Pq-mpw Especially the mesmerizing bouncing balls: https://youtu.be/Rszh-Pq-mpw?t=629 https://youtu.be/Rszh-Pq-mpw?t=629 Thinkin' Things Collection 2 Gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2Sh5pxLSlA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2Sh5pxLSlA Thinkin' Things Collection 3 Gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCFNUc10Vu8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCFNUc10Vu8 Alan Kay also loves Thinkin' Things (as well as Warren Robinett's "Rocky's Boots" and "Robot Odyssey", the same guy who made Atari Adventure), and cited one of its levels, a football halftime parade programming system, as a precursor to blocks-based visual programming: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17423040 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17423040 DonHopkins on June 29, 2018 | parent | context | favorite | on: Classic 1984 video game Robot Odyssey available on... From: Alan Kay Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2007 13:55:27 -0800 (PST) Subject: Re: Just curious ... To: Samuel Klein, Don Hopkins, Chris Trottier, John Gilmore Hi SJ -- Robot Odyssey is another game that would benefit from having a clean separation between the graphical/physical modeling simulation and the behavioral parts (both the games levels and the robot programming could be independently separated out) -- this would make a great target for those who would like to try their hand at game play and at robot behavioral programming systems. This is a long undropped shoe for me. When I was the CS at Atari in 82-84, it was one of our goals to make a number of the very best games into frameworks for end-user (especially children's) creativity. Alas, Atari had quite a down turn towards the end of 83 ... We did get "the Aquarium" idea from Ann Marion to morph into the Vivarium project at Apple ... And some of the results there helped with the later Etoys design. Cheers, Alan ---- From: Alan Kay Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2007 20:57:51 -0600 (CST) Subject: Re: Just curious ... To: Samuel Klein, Don Hopkins, Chris Trottier, John Gilmore Thanks SJ -- We are benefiting here from Don Hopkins' generosity (and of the original designers and owners of these games). The basic notion is that there are many games that, if modularized with nice separable interfaces, would be great environments for exploring various kinds of "learning by doing". For example, there is a nice separation between the "rules/dynamics" of a games world and the "strategies/actions" of the characters. There could be a third separation to break out the graphics and sound routines as a media environment. For example, in SimCity, the first and most useful breakout for children would be to allow various UIs to be made that would let children find out about and try experiments with the "city dynamics rules". It's not clear what the best forms for this would be, so it would be great to have a variety of different designers supply modules that would try to bridge the gaps to the child users. This could work even for pretty young children (we helped the Open Magnet School set up Doreen Nelson's "City Building" curriculum in the third grade of the school and this was very successful -- a child controlled SimCity would have been wonderful to have). Maybe this separation could be set up via the D-bus so that separate processes written in any language the authors choose could be used. This would open this game up to different experiments by different researchers to explore different kinds of UIs and strategy languages for various ages of children. I think this would be really cool! We would all learn a lot from this and the children would benefit greatly. A trickier deal would be the world dynamics (I'm just guessing here, but Don would know). This is one of the really great things about SimCity -- it can really accommodate lots of different changes and stitch things together to make a pretty decent simulation without too many seams showing. (Given the machines this game originally ran on, many of the heuristics are likely to be a little patchy. Don has indicated as much.) I think doing a great world dynamics engine for games like SimCity would be really wonderful -- and could even be a thesis project or two. Don has talked about doing the separations so that many new games can be made in addition to the variations. Similarly, Robot Odyssey (one of the best games concepts ever) was marred by choosing a way to program the robots where the complexity of programming grew much faster than the functionality that could be given to the robots. This game was way ahead of its time. Again, the idea would be do make a game in which environment, levels of challenge, and how the robots are programmed would be broken out into separate processes that a variety of gamers and researchers could do experiments in language and UI. One of the most wonderful possibilities about this venture is that it will bring together very fluent designers from many worlds of computing (more worlds than usually combine to make a game) in the service of the children. We should really try to pull this off! Cheers, Alan pjungwir on June 29, 2018 | root | parent | next [–] Does anyone here remember ZZT? I loved building puzzles in that game with the scripting language. You didn't program to play, but you could make your own games and program the behavior of special objects. It's the closest realized example I can think of to what Alan described here. jasonjayr on June 29, 2018 | root | parent | next [–] I remember ZZT -- and the excitement when I found an archive of alternate worlds I could download from a BBS. Learning to program ZZT worlds was one of the first steps I took to programming. DonHopkins on June 29, 2018 | root | parent | prev | next [–] I'm not familiar with ZZT, but here's a reference to another game that inspired Alan Kay, called "Thinkin' Things", in a discussion about the Snap! visual programming language! https://snap.berkeley.edu https://snap.berkeley.edu ---- From: Alan Kay Date: Thu, 3 May 2018 07:49:16 +0000 (UTC) Subject: Re: Blocky + Micropolis = Blockropolis! ;) Yes, all of these "blocks" editors sprouted from the original one I designed for Etoys* more than 20 years ago now -- most of the followup was by way of Jens Moenig -- who did SNAP. You can see Etoys demoed on the OLPC in my 2007 TED talk. I'd advise coming up with a special kid's oriented language for your SimCity/Metropolis system and then render it in "blocks". Cheers Alan ------------- * Two precursors for DnD programming were in my grad student's -- Mike Travers -- MIT thesis (not quite the same idea), and in the "Thinking Things" parade programming system (again, just individual symbol blocks rather than expressions). ---- From: Don Hopkins Date: Fri, 4 May 2018 00:43:56 +0200 Subject: Re: Blocky + Micropolis = Blockropolis! ;) I love fondly remember and love Thinkin’ Things 1, but I never saw the subsequent versions! But there’s a great demo on youtube! https://youtu.be/gCFNUc10Vu8?t=24m58s https://youtu.be/gCFNUc10Vu8?t=24m58s That would be a great way to program SimCity builder “agents” like the bulldozer and road layer, as well as agents like PacMan who know how to follow roads and eat traffic! I am trying to get my head around Snap by playing around with it and watching Jens’s youtube videos, and it’s dawning on me that that it’s full blown undiluted Scheme with continuations and visual macros plus the best ideas of Squeak! The concept of putting a “ring” around blocks to make them a first class function, and being able to define your own custom blocks that take bodies of block code as parameters like real Lisp macros is brilliant! That is what I’ve been dreaming about and wondering how to do for so long! Looks like he nailed it! ;) Here’s something I found that you wrote about tile programming six years ago. -Don Squeak-dev: http://squeak-dev.squeakfoundation.narkive.com/7ZN0H3vt/etoys-alice-and-tile-programming http://squeak-dev.squeakfoundation.narkive.com/7ZN0H3vt/etoy... Etoys, Alice and tile programming ajbn at cin.ufpe.br () 6 years ago Folks, I have been trying the new version of Alice <www.alice.org>. It also uses tile programming like Etoys. Just for curiosity, does anyone know the history of Tile Programming? TIA, Antonio Barros PhD Student Informatics Center Federal University of Pernambuco Brazil Alan Kay 6 years ago This particular strand starting with one of the projects I saw in the CDROM "Thinking Things" (I think it was the 3rd in the set). This project was basically about being able to march around a football field and the multiple marchers were controlled by a very simple tile based programming system. Also, a grad student from a number of years ago, Mike Travers, did a really excellent thesis at MIT about enduser programming of autonomous agents -- the system was called AGAR -- and many of these ideas were used in the Vivarium project at Apple 15 years ago. The thesis version of AGAR used DnD tiles to make programs in Mike's very powerful system. The etoys originated as a design I did to make a nice constructive environment for the internet -- the Disney Family.com site -- in which small projects could make by parents and kids working together. SqC made the etoys ideas work, and Kim Rose and teacher BJ Conn decided to see how they would work in a classroom. I thought the etoys lacked too many features to be really good in a classroom, but I was wrong. The small number of features and the ease of use turned out to be real virtues. We've been friends with Randy Pausch for a long time and have had a number of outstanding interns from his group at CMU over the years. For example, Jeff Pierce (now a prof at GaTech) did SqueakAlice working with Andreas Raab to tie it to Andreas' Balloon3D. Randy's group got interested in the etoys tile scripting and did a very nice variant (it's rather different from etoys, and maybe better). Cheers, Alan Mike Travers Portfolio: AGAR Ant World: https://hyperphor.com/portfolio/ant-world-illo.gif https://hyperphor.com/portfolio/ant-world-illo.gif Ant Agent Graph: https://hyperphor.com/portfolio/agent-graph-illo.gif https://hyperphor.com/portfolio/agent-graph-illo.gif Brainworks: https://hyperphor.com/portfolio/brainworks.jpg https://hyperphor.com/portfolio/brainworks.jpg Agar: An Animal Construction Kid (Mike Travers' thesis, supervised by Marvin Minsky): https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/78088 https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/78088 https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/78088/20084240-MIT.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/78088/2008424...

makach 2y ago

The sound effects are everything!

odysseus 2y ago

Just bought the iPad version. I am so excited to show my kids this when I get home from work tomorrow. They are going to be ecstatic. The sounds bring back so many great memories.

odysseus 2y ago

A couple of videos featuring Craig Hickman, creator of KidPix: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9yIOJow7oo&pp=ygUUY3JhaWcgaGlja21hbiBraWRwaXg%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9yIOJow7oo&pp=ygUUY3JhaWcgaGl... https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LqVhK6JgbSU&pp=ygUUY3JhaWcgaGlja21hbiBraWRwaXg%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LqVhK6JgbSU&pp=ygUUY3JhaWcgaGl... His enthusiasm is contagious!

pewu 2y ago

Does anyone else remember the clone Art for Kids for Atari [1], or more specifically, it's Polish version for Windows, Zostań Małym Picasso? There's no screenshot I could find of the latter, but looked exactly like the Atari clone. Now, KidPix unlocked tons of memories, have never played it, but TIL it's the original. [1] https://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-st-art-for-kids_28718.html https://www.atarimania.com/game-atari-st-art-for-kids_28718....

iamtedd 2y ago

If this is a clean-room re implementation, why are the original sound and graphics assets included in this GPL-licensed software?

vsgherzi 2y ago

my first "game" ever i had countless hours. Insane that we never got an equivalent for kids again

jyooi93 2y ago

Omg, this is the drawing tool I used in my primary school computer class; what a good old day!

overflyer 2y ago

Really nice project thanks. But I really really would reconsider the naming :D

Ylpertnodi 2y ago
Agree. That was not an easy click.

medhir 2y ago

at first I was shocked by the noise, but then the whole experience brought me back to 90s era computer games I played as a kid. very cool

furyg3 2y ago

At my elementary / Jr high school we had one Apple II in each classroom, which was fun to play Oregon trail and number munchers on. The 'computer lab' had a bunch of IIgs (color! woo!) and Macs, allowing one class at a time to come in for an hour or so. Usually it was Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, ClarisWorks (word), some LOGO programming application, and KidPix. KidPix was the big hit, it got everyone into the joy of computing, it tought kids how to save files, use disks, make copies, and it kept the ImageWriter color dot matrix printer buzzing for the whole hour. The "oh no" undo sound gives me so much joy. Thanks to whoever did this.

vmfunction 2y ago

Wow! When will beautiful doreena be ported? It is one of those software need to run quite old MacOS to work.

dangoodmanUT 2y ago

where's the music

Liftyee 2y ago

Reminds me of the hours I spent messing around on Tux Paint. For some reason, the canvas is rendering to the right of the top toolbar instead of below it (Firefox stable).

jackplug 2y ago

[flagged]

amaccuish 2y ago

Strong RM Colour Paint and RM Talking First Word from the UK vibes, love it. https://i.redd.it/0ivv3h2nkcj41.png https://i.redd.it/0ivv3h2nkcj41.png

TedDoesntTalk 2y ago

How I clear the screen to start new?

knocknock 2y ago
I selected the Eraser from the left menu and then selected Firecracker from the top menu.

kidpicked 2y ago

Is there a way to adjust the canvas size? The workable area stretches beyond my laptop screen and I have to scroll... some of the tools work slower doing their patterns when the canvas is this large. (I'm on Firefox's latest release, I've whitelisted their JS in noscript and even tried opening a private browsing window where uBlock is disabled in case some of the privacy stuff is interfering w/ rendering) But other than that cool work, it's really bringing me back to elementary/early middle school days... I wish I had some of the abstract art I'd create sitting waiting for the bus, but alongside sim cities and old essays it's gone with the (digital) wind...

3guk 2y ago

Wow what a trip down memory lane - I was obsessed with this as a child ! The sounds of each tool instantly transport me back !

jacobgkau 2y ago

That's neat! Although the first version was before my time. I had Kid Pix Deluxe 3 in elementary school, and eventually got my family to get it. Had to run it on our Windows ME computer since it crashed trying to run it on XP. (Crazy story how we even got a copy... I used to go and stare at the product page for Kid Pix Deluxe 3X, a remastered version for Mac, since it was the closest thing I could find to a source for the one I knew of. One day, my parents got an email from some company offering the original Deluxe 3 version for something like $40. Looking back on it, I have no clue how they got my parents' email address or if they were in any way associated with Brøderbund, and it was probably unsafe to give them payment info... but we actually got the software and I don't think the credit card was ever abused, so all's well that ends well.)

darajava 2y ago

Similar to: https://jspaint.app/ https://jspaint.app/