PyDPainter

If you want to play with software rendering, here's probably the shortest code that will get an ARGB8888 2D array from main memory to the screen efficiently for all platforms using SDL2 in C https://gist.github.com/CoryBloyd/6725bb78323bb1157ff8d4175d... you'll need to do the translation from a 320x200x8-bit palletized framebuffer to ARGB yourself ;) If you want to get inspired by what can be done with palletized framebuffers check out http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/ (click Show Options) and the GDC presentation by the artist https://youtu.be/aMcJ1Jvtef0 With that you can fire up https://github.com/mriale/PyDPainter for that classic Deluxe Paint IIe vibe. Or, https://www.aseprite.org/ for something more modern.

I made a DeluxePaint/Amiga LORA you can use with Stable Diffusion/FLUX a while back for the lulz[1] I also used that LORA and some video models to try to make a little movie with the same style[2] Here's a guide on how to generate LORAs too if you're interested[3] Finally, there's a DeluxePaint clone someone released that is pretty cool to play around with[4] [1]: https://civitai.com/models/875790/amiga-deluxepaint-or-fluxd [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_18NBAbJSqQ&feature=youtu.be [3]: https://reticulated.net/dailyai/creating-a-flux-dev-lora-ful... [4]: https://github.com/mriale/PyDPainter

Another Deluxe Paint clone is PyDPainter. It's Python-based and available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The UI is very much reminiscent of the original. https://github.com/mriale/PyDPainter

The author notes that circles don't draw well due to mouse polling, but I wonder if this isn't a limit of the emulator running on Windows. I remember Deluxe Paint III on the Amiga drawing freehand circles very well, whereas MS Paint on Windows 95, quickly drawn circles ended up looking like polyhedrons due to infrequent polling. There's a neat modern DPaint clone called PyDPainter (https://github.com/mriale/PyDPainter). It has various advantages, such as support for modern graphics formats like PNG.

Mark was nice enough to invite me to his home studio when I was a new high school grad to talk working in games as an artist. He told me the story of the fight over dithering. I give him strong partial credit for ending up a game engine/art pipeline coder instead and got to thank him after his most excellent GDC presentation on the lost power of palettized textures https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0 You can see that power in action here http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/ (Hit show options) http://www.effectgames.com/effect/article-Old_School_Color_C... BTW: Deluxe Paint has been remade in Python if you want to give it a try https://github.com/mriale/PyDPainter