The Commodore Amiga and Escom Amiga compatible drawing programs are more than 32 years old with the possibility of showing more than 4096 colors at the same time. Some of them are way older than Photoshop which was launched in 1990 even.
To celebrate the family of drawing apps from Commodore supportive companies that towered over the computing landscape in the 1980s and 1990s, we’re dusting off our gurus to remember the 10 drawing apps that defined this iconic line of drawing apps that should have made Amiga to the most used graphics machine today. Commodore?…
1. Deluxe Paint
EA or Electronic Arts is not the most loved company these days. But back in 1985! Electronic Arts were the huge savior for the Amiga platform with their launch of Deluxe Paint as one of the first drawing programs released for the platform. A worldwide known Amiga drawing program that even got its own Facebook page here. With this app, you can draw in few or in many colors thru HAM. Yes, with the launch in 1985 you could already then paint by using 4096 colors. Not fast, but it worked very well.
Company: Electronic Arts
Last version: Deluxe Paint V
2. Brilliance
By 1993, Deluxe Paint package by Electronic Arts got humongous popularity. So much that they released Deluxe Paint, Deluxe Paint II, Deluxe Paint III (introduced animation), Deluxe Paint IV (introduced AGA support) and then at the end Deluxe Paint V. Digital Creations came up with Brilliance paint package. It got layers of support and HAM8 support. You can also create animations in it. Sadly the team is really hard to reach. It would be nice to see an open-source Brilliance in the near future.
Company: Digital Creations
Last version: Brilliance 2.0
3. Personal Paint
Cloanto is known for Amiga Forever emulation package. They are also known for having the AmigaOS 3.1 license. They are battling today about the Amiga rights but seems like they’re having fun at meetings with Trevor Dickinson from A-EON. Personal Paint, however, is still in production, which makes it one of the worlds longest living drawing programs that are still alive. The last version came out in 2017. Personal Paint is a powerful and intuitive paint, image processing, animation, and 24-bit printing package. Employ stunning effects like embossing, water-colors, transparencies and stereograms (as in “Magic Eye”), while virtual memory and blitter emulation free precious Chip RAM by using other storage resources! Plus: support of RTG graphics cards, different file formats (IFF, GIF, PNG, PCX, JPEG, BMP, TIM, GraphiCraft, Photo CD, C source code, DataTypes, etc.),
Company: Cloanto
Last version: Personal Paint 7.2
With these Classic Amiga compatible Drawing Programs you can become very creative. They all support IFF, which is the standard image format that AmigaOS uses. What strikes us the most is Electronic Arts, which denies all requests about releasing Deluxe Paint source code so that nextgen AmigaOS systems can use it too like AROS, MorphOS, and AmigaOS4.
