Okay, so it might be old - but it’s still completely amazing! Review by Andy Hodgetts.

There are loads of ways to produce animated pixel art nowadays. You can crank up Photoshop and paint with your Wacom pad on layers, saving the animated GIF out of Adobe ImageReady. You can buy a copy of Pro Motion and use that. But in my opinion, none of these (or other options) can beat good old trusty Deluxe Paint Animation.

Okay, so you’re not going to be using your nice expensive Wacom pad with it (although if you whack the pen into ‘mouse’ mode it is usable) and, since at the time it came out VGA was considered totally amazing, don’t be expecting any resolution other than 320×200.

But in spite of this, it’s still the best application for drawing pixel art.

Aaaah… bless trust old DPaint Animation!

Take Pro Motion, for example. It replicates many of the features of DP Animation except it slightly weird-ifies them. Pressing ‘U’ to ‘undo’ is acceptable in an MS-DOS application, but doing it within Windows makes your head explode. And the palette editor is horrible and way too small - especially when your Windows resolution is set to 1600×1200 (or god forbid… higher).

DPaint’s lovely, simple, and chunky gradient / palette editor

And speaking of Windows resolutions, drawing a 64×64 sprite in a 1600×1200 environment is just silly. Yes, okay you can zoom in but for some reason it feels nicer when your smallest pixel size - the furthest you can possibly zoom out - are still nice big chunky VGA pixels.

Of course, there’s the aspect resolution issue - drawing at 320×200 isn’t the same pixel aspect as normal Windowsy modes so everything’s going to be a bit vertically squidged if you’re drawing sprites for a Windows game. However, you can actually address this if you run DP through DOSBox and fiddle with the display settings - basically run the thing in a big scaled-up window.

So, while practically all of Deluxe Paint Animation’s features (animated brushes, dither brushes, anti-aliasing, gradients, stencils, pseudo-3D brush manipulation) have been replicated in other packages, nothing beats Deluxe Paint for simplicity (once you get your head around the hotkeys) and cleanliness (no horrid menus cluttering everything up - toggle the interface with F9 and F10).

The fact that even today, 19 years after its release, it’s a package that I still crack open whenever I’m working on GBA or DS projects is testament to its usefulness.

Of course, I do rather have the benefit of buying this back when it came out - unfortunately EA haven’t made it abandonware so it’s still illegal to download it, but neither do they support it so you can’t buy it off them. Basically, that pretty much limits you to EBay.

Summary

Cool things

• Huge array of useful pixel-editing tools
• Palette tools are lovely to use
• A true 8bit application - hello colour cycling!
• Native 320×200 resolution prefereable when producing low-res sprites
• It’s DPaint, goddamn it! It’s a little slice of history!
• Runs in Windows using DosBox

Rubbish things

• No true tablet support
• No good if you want to make a 24bit sprite
• No good if you want to make a sprite larger than 200 pixels tall
• Need to learn a new set of hotkeys
• No onion-skinning
• Er, not exactly readily available for purchase

Final Verdict