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Hyper Pyxel

Hyper Pyxel is a paint program based on Deluxe Paint and Brilliance (on the Commodore Amiga). It is made for pixel precise editing. It was conceived already in the days when I was making my first steps into using Microsoft Windows machines, after the Amiga started lagging to far behind. The change from Deluxe Paint on the Amiga to having MSPaint + Paint Shop Pro on the PC, could be seen as the main motivator. Neither MSPaint, nor Paint Shop Pro could compete in usability, features and ease of use.

Hyper Pyxel sometimes will be shortened down to HP. This you can see for example in the HP logo:

Hyper Pyxel Logo

Why making Hyper Pyxel

At-the-time-of-writing, it is 2020 of course, and there are some very good paint programs out there already, even for Pixel Art. Photoshop is a program that can do almost anything, and in a more smaller packages, Promotion is also a great example. So why create another one?

  1. I find is fun to program.
  2. It was still on my bucket list.
  3. I had this feeling that it must be possible to do so right in the browser, as I was experimenting with Javascript, so why not give it a swirl?
  4. After some “midnight coding”, the basis of Hyper Pyxel was created. Then it was just fun to add the features, and see how far I could take it.

Deluxe Paint and Brilliance?

These are (for me) THE two pixel painting programs, that at the time, really pushed the envelope with what was possible. Deluxe Paint had a long history, and a bit at the end of the live time of the Commodore Amiga, Brilliance came along.

Below a screenshot and a link to Wikipedia on Deluxe Paint:

Anatoly Shashkin💾 on Twitter: "Deluxe Paint, DOS versions. Deluxe ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluxe_Paint

Below a screenshot and a link to Wikipedia on Brilliance:

Amiga 500 Vampire 2 Gold Core 3 AGA HIRES Ham 8 200 frame ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliance_(graphics_editor)

Browser Compatibility

Hyper Pyxel is written in ECMAScript 6 (Javascript 6), which is very new at the time of writing, and because of that it has poor browser support.

It only is know to work well on Chrome. It also works on Edge, however Edge is too slow, so it really only runs on Google Chrome. Will I “fix” that? Probably not. Instead of making it cross browser compatible, I have a different design philosophy. Like desktop program, that use to have an “minimum system requirement”, I am taking that concept to a “minimum browser operating system requirement”, so Hyper Pyxel has as an “Browser OS” minimum requirement: a recent (2019+/Version 83.0.4103.97) version of Chrome.