Re: 256 Color GS Paint Program

[spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

In article Daniel Webster <dwebster@monmouth.com> writes...

>I am looking to get a 256 color Paint program for the GS, one that lets
>you use and manipulate all 16 available color pallettes.  I read that
>DreamGraphics would allow this, but with EGO systems gone I don;t know
>where I can get it.  Are there any available commercial or Shareware GS
>paint programs that let you do this?

    Well without a doubt, DreamGrafix was the best multi-palette paint
program ever written, picking and assigning palettes was a snap. You
would visually see where each palette started and stopped, by means
of adjustable (colored) markers in the screen's border area. You could
actually paint in either 256 or 3200 colors, though the latter was not
very usable (keeping track of *200* palattes on a line by line basis
is almost madening, though 16 palettes is workable and what most people
used). It is no longer sold or available. Someone might want to get in
contact with Steve Chiang or Jason Anderson, who were both working at
Visual Concepts last time I checked (it's been years since I've spoken
with either author, shortly after releasing DuelTris they dropped out
of the Apple II scene).

    Here are some other alternatives, though I must warn you, are no
where as easy to use as DreamGrafix and make working with 256 colors
difficult and confusing. First there is El Kassir's "Color+" program,
which had commercial status, but is no longer sold today. I wouldn't
recommend it though, it used a custom GUI written under Applesoft
BASIC (I'm not kidding!) and was dreadfully slow, clumsy and quite
unstable and buggy too.

    The next two are freeware status that run under GS/OS. The first
is called "Soft Palette" and the other is called "Paint 256". They
work and are usable, and offer most of the basic paint/draw tools,
but there's not much more to say beyond that. You can probably find
them both on FTP sites (if not let me know and I will upload them to
either Caltech or Ground; I can no longer post to comp.binaries.apple2
since the university removed all binary groups from the newserver
permanently :/).

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca