Pixel art I made a couple of years ago in KoalaPainter, one of the oldest drawing programs for personal computers I could find. It was released in 1983 with a KoalaPad tablet. The version I used has limitations specific to Commodore 64’s Multicolor Bitmap mode: the canvas consists of 4 × 8 areas (8 × 8 if you ignore the fact that pixels have a 2:1 aspect ratio) that can contain only up to 4 colors, including the background (can be changed only with the Xcolor tool). Also, the image would get squished a little on a CRT monitor but I failed to consider that. Maybe next time.
If you want to give it a try yourself, there is a short tutorial below the cut.
To run KoalaPainter, just drag KOALAPAINTER.CRT on x64sc.exe (it’s in the bin folder).
To set up the controls, go to Preferences → Settings → Input devices → Control Port and select KoalaPad for Control Port #1. Exit the menu and press Alt+M (a shortcut to toggle input grab). You can use your graphics tablet as a mouse if the drivers allow it.
To switch between the canvas and tools, move the cursor below the screen and left click.
To save your images, you need to either create a new disc image (File → Create and attach an empty disk image) or attach an existing one (File → Attach disk image → Drive #… and click Attach / Load). Go to the tool screen → Storage and click Save, then select a save slot. To open a saved image, click Get instead of Save.
To export the images, drag the save file into the DirMaster window, double click on your image name, and select File → Export.
Another thing I did was download www.colodore.com as HTML and edit images.js to include my drawing to see what it would’ve looked like on a monitor of that time...
KoalaPainter (1983) was a bitmap graphics editor for Apple II, TRS-80, Atari, Commodore 64 and PC (it was shipped with the KoalaPad graphics tablet ). It featured the "Undo" button that was called "Oops"
