GrafX2 is a

bitmap graphics editor A raster graphics editor is a computer program that allows users to create and edit images interactively on the computer screen and save them in one of many raster graphics file formats (also known as bitmap images) such as JPEG, PNG, and GIF. ...

inspired by the Amiga programs

Deluxe Paint Deluxe Paint, often referred to as ''DPaint'', is a bitmap graphics editor created by Dan Silva for Electronic Arts and published for the then-new Amiga 1000 in November 1985. A series of updated versions followed, some of which were ported ...

and Brilliance. It is

free software Free software or libre software is computer software distributed under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions. Free software is a matter of liberty, no ...

and distributed under the GPL-2.0-only license.

History

GrafX2 was an MS-DOS program developed by Sunset Design from 1996 to 2001 . It was distributed as

freeware Freeware is software, most often proprietary, that is distributed at no monetary cost to the end user. There is no agreed-upon set of rights, license, or EULA that defines ''freeware'' unambiguously; every publisher defines its own rules for the f ...

, and was one of the most used graphics editor in the

demoscene The demoscene is an international computer art subculture focused on producing demos: self-contained, sometimes extremely small, computer programs that produce audiovisual presentations. The purpose of a demo is to show off programming, visual ...

. The development stopped due the lack of time of the developers. So they released the sourcecode under the GPL-2.0-only license. A Windows port was done by the Eclipse demogroup and presented at the State of the art party in 2004, but the sourcecode for this version does not seem to be available anywhere. In 2007, a project was started to port the sourcecode from the original MS-DOS version to the

Simple DirectMedia Layer Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) is a cross-platform software development library designed to provide a hardware abstraction layer for computer multimedia hardware components. Software developers can use it to write high-performance computer games ...

library. The goal was to provide a pixel art editing tool for Linux, but SDL also allowed easy ports to many other platforms, including Windows. The project development continued on this new version to add the features missing from the original opensource release and the first Windows port.

Features and specificities

What made GrafX2 interesting when it was released in 1996 was the ability to display pictures in most of the resolutions available on Amiga. This allowed the use of the program as a picture viewer for PC users. This was done by low level programming of the video card, using X-Modes combined with

VESA VESA (), formally known as Video Electronics Standards Association, is an American technical standards organization for computer display standards. The organization was incorporated in California in July 1989To retrieve the information, searc ...

settings. The SDL port generally runs on platforms which use high resolution screens, so it can use software scaling to emulate low resolutions. The scaling options include several non-square pixels, this allows editing of pictures for displaying on old 16- or 8-bit microcomputers, which have such video modes. All the versions of the program are designed for drawing in

indexed color In computing, indexed color is a technique to manage digital images' colors in a limited fashion, in order to save computer memory and file storage, while speeding up display refresh and file transfers. It is a form of vector quantization compr ...

mode, up to 256 colors. A palette editor allows very precise operations on the image and its palette. These functions are precious for console or mobile game graphics where some specific color indices in the palette are required for special effects:

Palette swap This list includes terms used in video games and the video game industry, as well as slang used by players. 0–9 A ...

Color cycling Color cycling, also known as palette shifting, is a technique used in computer graphics in which colors are changed in order to give the impression of animation. This technique was mainly used in early computer games, as storing one image and cha ...

, transparent color for sprites. The user interface is mouse-driven with a toolbar for common tools, and some modal dialog windows. For increased productivity with frequently used functions, an extensive system of

keyboard shortcut computing, a keyboard shortcut also known as hotkey is a series of one or several keys to quickly invoke a software program or perform a preprogrammed action. This action may be part of the standard functionality of the operating system or ...

s is available. The user can split the editing area in two : normal size on the left, zoomed-in view on the right. Drawing in the zoomed area allows finer mouse control. The basic drawing concepts are clearly inspired by Deluxe Paint, they involve : * a brush : It's one of the built-in monochrome shape, or a piece of colored bitmap grabbed by the user. The brush appears 'stuck' under the mouse cursor, it gives an accurate preview. * a tool that pastes the brush on the image at several places : Freehand drawing, straight line, circle, curve, airbrush... * optionally, a number of Effects that change the way pixels are drawn: For example, the Shade mode ignores the brush color, it lightens or darkens the picture depending on the mouse button used (and depending on user-defined color ranges). Some of the effects are classic for a 24bit RGB drawing program (Transparency, Smoothing, Smearing), but their effectiveness in GrafX2 is limited according to the colors pre-defined in the palette. The SDL port currently runs on a lot of computer systems, tested on common systems such as Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, MacOS, and on less common ones such as

AmigaOS AmigaOS is a family of proprietary native operating systems of the Amiga and AmigaOne personal computers. It was developed first by Commodore International and introduced with the launch of the first Amiga, the Amiga 1000, in 1985. Early version ...

3.x on 68k, AmigaOS 4.0 on PPC,

BeOS BeOS is an operating system for personal computers first developed by Be Inc. in 1990. It was first written to run on BeBox hardware. BeOS was positioned as a multimedia platform that could be used by a substantial population of desktop users a ...

and

Haiku is a type of short form poetry originally from Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases that contain a ''kireji'', or "cutting word", 17 '' on'' (phonetic units similar to syllables) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern, and a ''kigo'', or se ...

MorphOS MorphOS is an AmigaOS-like computer operating system (OS). It is a mixed Proprietary software, proprietary and Open-source software, open source OS produced for the Pegasos PowerPC (PPC) processor based computer, PowerUP accelerator equipped Amig ...

on PPC,

AROS Aros may refer to: *Aros (Middle-earth), a river in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium * Aros, Mull, the location of Aros Castle, a ruined 13th-century castle on the Isle of Mull, Scotland *AROS Research Operating System, a free software i ...

on x86,

SkyOS SkyOS (''Sky Operating System'') is a discontinued prototype commercial, proprietary, graphical desktop operating system written for the x86 computer architecture. As of January 30, 2009 development was halted with no plans to resume its develop ...

, Atari MiNT on Atari Falcon030 and

Atari TT The Atari TT030 is a member of the Atari ST family, released in 1990. It was originally intended to be a high-end Unix workstation, but Atari took two years to release a port of Unix SVR4 for the TT, which prevented the TT from ever being serious ...

. It is even ported on the Handheld game console GP2X, and the Windows version can be used on MS-DOS thru HX DOS Extender.

Relation to the demoscene

The first release of GrafX2 was done at the Wired 96

demoparty The demoscene is an international computer art subculture focused on producing demos: self-contained, sometimes extremely small, computer programs that produce audiovisual presentations. The purpose of a demo is to show off programming, visual ...

. The tool was primarily made for demomakers. This explains the presence of features specific to old computers, because demosceners often use this kind of hardware. Today, the program is mostly used for

Pixel art Pixel art () is a form of digital art drawn with graphics software, graphical software where images are built using pixels as the only building block. It is widely associated with the low-resolution graphics from 8-bit and 16-bit era computers a ...

, not necessarily in relation to demos or to old and limited hardware.

Supported file formats

* PKM (Sunset Design) (This is a custom format used only by GrafX2. It was done in the first version as an easy way to save pictures, before the gif format was managed perfectly.) * BMP (Microsoft,

BMP file format The BMP file format, also known as bitmap image file, device independent bitmap (DIB) file format and bitmap, is a raster graphics image file format used to store bitmap digital images, independently of the display device (such as a graphics adapt ...

) * CEL, KCF (K.O.S.

Kisekae Set System Kisekae Set System (commonly known as KiSS) is a blending of art with computers originally designed to allow creation of virtual "paper dolls". Kisekae is short for "kisekae ningyou"; a Japanese term meaning "dress-up dolls". Unlike "computer art" ...

) *

GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , see pronunciation) is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on 15 June 1987. ...

(

Compuserve CompuServe (CompuServe Information Service, also known by its initialism CIS) was an American online service provider, the first major commercial one in the world – described in 1994 as "the oldest of the Big Three information services (the oth ...

) * IMG (Bivas) * LBM (

Electronic Arts Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) is an American video game company headquartered in Redwood City, California. Founded in May 1982 by Apple employee Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer game industry and promoted the d ...

) (Support for files from

, but also a lot of

Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphi ...

paint programs) * PAL *

PCX PCX, standing for ''PiCture eXchange'', was an image file format developed by the now-defunct ZSoft Corporation of Marietta, Georgia, United States. It was the native file format for PC Paintbrush and became one of the first widely accepted DOS ...

(Z-Soft) * PI1, PC1 ( Degas Elite) * PNG (

Portable Network Graphics Portable Network Graphics (PNG, officially pronounced , colloquially pronounced ) is a raster-graphics file format that supports lossless data compression. PNG was developed as an improved, non-patented replacement for Graphics Interchange F ...

) (only in the Windows and SDL ports) * SCx (Colorix) * NEO (

NeoChrome NEOchrome is an early color bitmap graphics editor for the Atari ST. It was written by Dave Staugas, a programmer at Atari Corporation and co-author of the ST's operating system. ''NEOchrome'' supports hardware-supported color cycling to give the i ...

) * C64 picture formats ( Koala Painter, CDU-Paint, FLI, etc.) * CPC picture formats (PPH, CM5, etc.) *

JPEG JPEG ( ) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and imag ...

(only loading) * TGA (

Truevision TGA Truevision TGA, often referred to as TARGA, is a raster graphics file format created by Truevision Inc. (now part of Avid Technology). It was the native format of TARGA and VISTA boards, which were the first graphic cards for IBM-compatible P ...

only loading) *

TIFF Tag Image File Format, abbreviated TIFF or TIF, is an image file format for storing raster graphics images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, and photographers. TIFF is widely supported by scanning, faxing, word processin ...

(

Aldus Corporation Aldus Corporation was an American software company best known for its pioneering desktop publishing (DTP) software. PageMaker, the company's most well-known product, ushered in the modern era of desktop computers such as the Macintosh seeing ...

)
RECOIL
can be used to load a lot of native file formats of vintage computers.

References

External links