When Deluxe Paint came out with the original Amiga in 1985, it was the killer app for the platform. [Christopher Drum] starts his recent article on just that note, remembering the day he and his mother walked into a computer store, and walked out with a brand new Amiga… thanks entirely to Deluxe Paint. Forty years on, how well can this killer app compete?

[Christopher] isn’t putting Deluxe Paint head-to-head with modern Photoshop; they’re hardly in the same class. Not Photoshop, no, but modern applications that do what Deluxe Paint did so well: pixel art. There was no need to call it pixel art back then, no, but with the resolutions on hand, all digital art was pixel art in 1985.

Or 1989, which is when Deluxe Paint III came out– that’s the last version written by Dan Silva and coincidentally the last version [Christopher] owned, and the one he focuses in on his tests. It has held up amazingly well.

Sure, you don’t get a full 24-bit colour palette, but most pixel artists stick to limited palettes still anyway. You don’t quite get a modern UI, but presence of useful keyboard shortcuts allows a Hands-On-Keybord-And-Mouse (We’ll call it HOKAM, in honour of HOTAS in aerospace) workflow that is incredibly efficient.

About the only things [Christopher] found Deluxe Paint III lacked compared to its successors were a proper layering system, and of course the infinite undo we’ve all gotten so used to. (DPIII has an undo button, but it could only store one operation.) He also complained about cursor latency for some brushes, but we wonder if that might have had something to do with Windows and the emulation layer adding a delay. One thing Amiga was always known for back in the day was the snappy cursor movement, even when the processor was loaded.

There were just as many features he found had been forgotten in the new generation — like palatte swapping animations, or flood-filling line gradients.

Anyone who owned an Amgia probably has fond memories of it, but alas, in spite of Commodore’s recent resurrection, we’re not likely to see a new one soon. On the other hand, at least when it comes to pixel art, there’s apparently no need to upgrade.

via reddit.

(Thumbnail and header image by Avril Harrison, distributed by Electronic Arts with Deluxe Paint.)

AMD have announced the end of the AMDVLK open driver in favour of focusing on radv for Linux use cases.

When Bas and I started radv in 2016, AMD were promising their own Linux vulkan driver, which arrived in Dec 2017. At this point radv was already shipping in most Linux distros. AMD strategy of having AMDVLK was developed via over the wall open source releases from internal closed development was always going to be a second place option at that point.

When Valve came on board and brought dedicated developer power to radv, and the aco compiler matured, there really was no point putting effort into using AMDVLK which was hard to package and impossible to contribute to meaningfully for external developers.

radv is probably my proudest contribution to the Linux ecosystem, finally disproving years of idiots saying an open source driver could never compete with a vendor provided driver, now it is the vendor provided driver.

I think we will miss the open source PAL repo as a reference source and I hope AMD engineers can bridge that gap, but it's often hard to find workarounds you don't know exist to ask about them. I'm also hoping AMD will add more staffing beyond the current levels especially around hardware enablement and workarounds.

Now onwards to NVK victory :-)

[1] https://github.com/GPUOpen-Drivers/AMDVLK/discussions/416

Check out this new Learn Guide for emulating the NES on Fruit Jam!

The Nintendo Entertainment System (or Famicom in Japan) still holds a certain mystique, with genre-defining games like Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda. The console remains a popular target for emulation, which is what we’ll do here on the Fruit Jam paired with an HDMI TV or monitor for display. You’ve got several controller options for single player or two player using a USB gamepad and/or a Nintendo Wii Classic/NES Classic/SNES Classic controller over I2C with a breakout board.

The software for this guide is Frank Hoedemakers’ pico-infonesPlus — which came from Jay Kumogata’s InfoNES, ported to RP2040  by Shuichi Takano (building on Luke Wren’s PicoDVI library), Frank’s work on the SD card and game menu, Gavin Knight for metadata file work, and some controller code from Adafruit. That’s a lot of pieces…but you can use a ready-made .UF2 file to make installation easy.

In this latest version, Frank has ported it to Fruit Jam and included support for:

• DAC headphone output
• Onboard speaker output
• NeoPixel VU meter
• Two player gaming with one USB controller plus a second I2C Nintendo classic controller (Wii-chuck style)
• Screensaver using metadata-based game info and box artwork

Read more at Fruit Jam Nintendo Entertainment System

YouTuber Alexander Gorovenko built this futuristic watch using some sleek micro 5×7 dot matrix displays. Like an iced out Rolex, this watch is instead covered in displays.

Prototyped on a raspberry Pi Pico, in the build he opted for a STM32U083kCU6 chip. He designed a custom flexible PCB to comfortably wrap around the wrist. Great video and project, especially for his first one!

The main parts I used for the watch are as follows,

• The display, which is the HCMS2901 (A more 3.3V friendly HCMS3901 exists now and is easier to find new). I got my displays on eBay.
• The microcontroller, the stm32u08, offers a real time clock and USB programming.
• A vape battery.
• STC4054 LIPO charger IC.
• Generic 3.3v LDO regulator.
• and several capacitors.

I got most of my parts from Digikey but many places sell most of the parts I bought.

Gorovenko shared the schematic and code repos:

Schematics/PC https://github.com/sahko123/orange_loop_schematics/tree/master
Code: https://github.com/sahko123/orange-loop-firmware

See more and check them out on Instagram @sahko123

Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!