GrafX2 is a

bitmap graphics editor A raster graphics editor (also called bitmap graphics editor) is a computer program that allows users to Computer graphics, create and image editing, edit images interactively on the computer screen and save them in one of many raster graphics I ...

inspired by the

Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers produced by Commodore International, Commodore from 1985 until the company's bankruptcy in 1994, with production by others afterward. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16-b ...

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, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

and distributed under the GPL-2.0-only license.

History

GrafX2 was an

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few op ...

program developed by Sunset Design from 1996 to 2001 . It was distributed as

freeware Freeware is software, 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 free ...

, 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 computer programmi ...

. The development stopped due the lack of time of the developers. So they released the

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

under the GPL-2.0-only license. A

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

port was done by the Eclipse

demogroup Demogroups are teams of demosceners, who make computer based audio-visual works of art known as demos. Demogroups form a subculture collectively known as the demoscene. Groups frequently consist of students, young computer enthusiasts who spen ...

and presented at the State of the art party in 2004, but the source code for this version does not seem to be available anywhere. In 2007, a project was started to port the source code from the original MS-DOS version to the Simple DirectMedia Layer library. The goal was to provide a pixel art editing tool for

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

, 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 open source release and the first Windows port.

Features

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 A low-level programming language is a programming language that provides little or no abstraction from a computer's instruction set architecture, memory or underlying physical hardware; commands or functions in the language are structurally simil ...

of the

video card A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics accelerator, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or colloquially GPU) is a computer expansion card that generates a feed of graphics output to a displa ...

, using X-Modes combined with

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

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 In computer architecture, 8-bit integers or other data units are those that are 8 bits wide (1 octet). Also, 8-bit central processing unit (CPU) and arithmetic logic unit (ALU) architectures are those that are based on registers or data bu ...

microcomputer A microcomputer is a small, relatively inexpensive computer having a central processing unit (CPU) made out of a microprocessor. The computer also includes memory and input/output (I/O) circuitry together mounted on a printed circuit board (P ...

s, 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 computer data storage, memory and Hard disk drive, file storage, while speeding up display refresh and file transfers. It ...

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 Since the origin of video games in the early 1970s, the video game industry, the gamer, players, and video game culture, surrounding culture have spawned a wide range of technical and slang terms. 0–9 ...

, Color cycling, 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 In computing, a keyboard shortcut (also hotkey/hot key or key binding) is a software-based assignment of an action to one or more keys on a computer keyboard. Most Operating system, operating systems and Application software, applications come ...

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

24-bit Notable 24-bit machines include the CDC 924 – a 24-bit version of the CDC 1604, CDC lower 3000 series, SDS 930 and SDS 940, the ICT 1900 series, the Elliott 4100 series, and the Datacraft minicomputers/ Harris H series. The term SWORD ...

RGB The RGB color model is an additive color model in which the red, green, and blue primary colors of light are added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colors. The name of the model comes from the initials of the three ...

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 versions ...

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

BeOS BeOS is a discontinued operating system for personal computers that was developed by Be Inc. It was conceived for the company's BeBox personal computer which was released in 1995. BeOS was designed for multitasking, multithreading, and a graph ...

and

Haiku is a type of short form poetry that originated in Japan. Traditional Japanese haiku consist of three phrases composed of 17 Mora (linguistics), morae (called ''On (Japanese prosody), on'' in Japanese) in a 5, 7, 5 pattern; that include a ''kire ...

MorphOS MorphOS is an AmigaOS-like operating system designed for Power and PowerPC based computers. The core, based on the Quark microkernel, is proprietary, although several libraries and other parts are open source, such as the Ambient desktop. The p ...

on PPC, AROS on x86, SkyOS, Atari MiNT on Atari Falcon030 and

Atari TT The Atari TT030, more commonly known as the Atari TT, 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 ...

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

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 Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

BMP file format The BMP file format, or bitmap, is a raster graphics image file format used to store bitmap digital images, independently of the display device (such as a graphics adapter), especially on Microsoft Windows and OS/2 operating systems. The BMP f ...

) * 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 , a Japanese term meaning "dress-up dolls". Unlike "computer art" which creates o ...

) *

GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , ) is a Raster graphics, bitmap Image file formats, image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released ...

(

Compuserve CompuServe, Inc. (CompuServe Information Service, Inc., also known by its initialism CIS or later CSi) was an American Internet company that provided the first major commercial online service provider, online service. It opened in 1969 as a times ...

) * 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 former Apple Inc., Apple employee Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer game industry ...

) (Support for files from

, but also a lot of

paint programs) * PAL * PCX

PC Paintbrush PC Paintbrush was a graphics editing software created by the ZSoft Corporation in 1984 for computers running the MS-DOS operating system. Published alongside Microsoft Mouse DOS drivers version 4 from 1985 as a direct response to Mouse Systems ...

(Z-Soft) * PI1, PC1 (

Degas Elite Edgar Degas (, ; born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas, ; 19 July 183427 September 1917) was a French Impressionist artist famous for his pastel drawings and oil paintings. Degas also produced bronze sculptures, prints, and drawings. Degas is es ...

) * PNG (

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

) (only in the Windows and SDL ports) * SCx (Colorix) * NEO ( NeoChrome) * C64 picture formats ( Koala Painter, CDU-Paint, FLI, etc.) * CPC picture formats (PPH, CM5, etc.) *

JPEG JPEG ( , short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and sometimes retroactively referred to as JPEG 1) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degr ...

(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 ...

only loading) *

TIFF Tag Image File Format or Tagged Image File Format, commonly known by the abbreviations TIFF or TIF, is an image file format for storing raster graphics images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, and photographers. TIFF is w ...

(

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

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

vintage computer A vintage computer is an older computer system that is largely regarded as obsolete. The personal computer has been around since around 1971, and in that time technological advancement means existing models get replaced every few years. Neverthel ...

References

External links

*
source code git repository
* Linux packages
DebianUbuntu

DOS version on pouet.net
{{DEFAULTSORT:Grafx2 Free raster graphics editors Free software programmed in C Raster graphics editors for Linux Computer art Demoscene software Amiga software BeOS software Lua (programming language)-scriptable software Free software that uses SDL

History

Features

File formats

See also

References

Further reading

External links