Deluxe Paint

Deluxe Paint (DPaint) is a bitmap image drawing program created by Dan Silva for Electronic Arts (EA). The original version was created for the Commodore Amiga computers and released in November 1985. Its version 2 was ported to other platforms (not the later versions 3, 4 and 5), but it was only on the Amiga, where the application obtained the status of star application, that is, of being an application so useful that people bought said computer just for the program.

Deluxe Paint was created as an internal graphics development tool called Prism used by EA. As Silva added more features to Prism, commercial potential began to emerge. When the Amiga began shipping in 1985, the DPaint quickly followed. In a short time it was accepted by the Amiga user community and became the standard graphics editor for that platform. Later, Amiga manufacturer Commodore International signed with EA to incorporate the program (and its later versions 2, 3, 4 and 5) in all Amigas released from the factory. This agreement lasted until Commodore's bankruptcy in 1994.

With the development of Deluxe Paint, EA introduced the IFF standard, which allowed graphics, text, animations, sounds and any type of data to be encapsulated in a single container. ILBM was used for the graphics, which was commonly used on the Amiga, but never gained the same acceptance on other platforms. DPaint allows graphics to be stored as a complete image or as brushes (with the.brush extension in its Amiga version).

Deluxe Paint was used by multiple video game houses to make graphics (regardless of the platform) from the late 80s to the early 90s. For example Lucasarts used it to make the graphics of its graphic adventures, such as the game Monkey Island. It was also used in classics such as Wolfenstein 3D, Eye of the Beholder, Dark Seed or Another World.

There was some legal controversy over the images created by the program in its early versions. EA argued that the copyright on the images created with its software should be its property, since the copyright on the program itself was its own. The court determined, however, that they did not own the rights to the works created with the program. If they were, developers of compilers and other programs could claim their rights to what was created with their products (and by extension, paper and pencil makers could claim their rights to any book written with their tools).

The source code for version 1.0 was opened for consultation and is available at the Computer History Museum.