A blitter is a circuit, sometimes as a coprocessor or a logic block on a microprocessor, dedicated to the rapid movement and modification of data within a computer's memory. A blitter can copy large quantities of data from one memory area to another relatively quickly, and in parallel with the CPU, while freeing up the CPU's more complex capabilities for other operations. A typical use for a blitter is the movement of a bitmap, such as windows and icons in a graphical user interface or images and backgrounds in a 2D video game. The name comes from the bit blit operation of the 1973 Xerox Alto, which stands for bit-block transfer. A blit operation is more than a memory copy, because it can involve data that's not byte aligned, handling transparent pixels, and various ways of combining the source and destination data.
Bit blit is a data operation commonly used in computer graphics in which several bitmaps are combined into one using a boolean function.
MacPaint is a raster graphics editor developed by Apple Computer and released with the original Macintosh personal computer on January 24, 1984. It was sold separately for US$195 with its word processing counterpart, MacWrite. MacPaint was notable because it could generate graphics that could be used by other applications. It taught consumers what a graphics-based system could do by using the mouse, the clipboard, and QuickDraw picture language. Pictures could be cut from MacPaint and pasted into MacWrite documents.
Deluxe Paint, often referred to as DPaint, is a bitmap graphics editor created by Dan Silva for Electronic Arts and published for the then-new Amiga 1000 in November 1985. A series of updated versions followed, some of which were ported to other platforms. An MS-DOS release with support for the 256 color VGA standard became popular for creating pixel graphics in video games in the 1990s.
The KoalaPad is a graphics tablet, released in 1983 by U.S. company Koala Technologies Corporation, for the Apple II, TRS-80 Color Computer, Atari 8-bit family, and Commodore 64, as well as for the IBM PC.
Amiga Basic is an interpreted BASIC programming language implementation for the Commodore Amiga, designed and written by Microsoft. Amiga Basic shipped with AmigaOS versions 1.1 to 1.3. It succeeded MetaComCo's ABasiC, which was included in AmigaOS 1.0 and 1.1, and was superseded by ARexx, a REXX-style scripting language, from AmigaOS version 2.0 onwards.
ARexx is an implementation of the Rexx language for the Amiga, written in 1987 by William S. Hawes, with a number of Amiga-specific features beyond standard REXX facilities. Like most REXX implementations, ARexx is an interpreted language. Programs written for ARexx are called "scripts", or "macros"; several programs offer the ability to run ARexx scripts in their main interface as macros.
The Faery Tale Adventure is a 1987 action role-playing video game designed by David Joiner and published by MicroIllusions for the Amiga, and later ported to the Commodore 64, MS-DOS, and Sega Genesis. The MS-DOS version is titled The Faery Tale Adventure: Book I. Microillusions also released a "Book 1" version for the Amiga which was going to be the start of a series of games, according to Talin, but bankruptcy prevented it. The initial version was produced for the Amiga 1000 and featured the largest game world to that date. A sequel, Faery Tale Adventure II: Halls of the Dead, was released in 1997.
Brilliance is a bitmap graphics editor for the Amiga computer, published by Digital Creations in 1993. Although marketed as a single package, Brilliance in reality consisted of two separate applications. One was a palette-based package also named Brilliance. The other was a true-color package called TrueBrilliance.
Amiga software is computer software engineered to run on the Amiga personal computer. Amiga software covers many applications, including productivity, digital art, games, commercial, freeware and hobbyist products. The market was active in the late 1980s and early 1990s but then dwindled. Most Amiga products were originally created directly for the Amiga computer, and were not ported from other platforms.
SuperPaint is a graphics program capable of both bitmap painting and vector drawing. SuperPaint was one of the first programs of its kind, combining the features of MacPaint and MacDraw while adding many new features of its own.
Photogenics is raster graphic editing software produced by Idruna Software.
MicroIllusions, based in Granada Hills, California was a computer game developer and publisher of the home computer era. MicroIllusions, as a company, was a strong supporter of the Amiga and typically released titles on that platform before porting it to others. Activision cancelled them as an affiliated publisher after a year of signing them up. The company went out of business in or about 1990.
Cricket Paint was a second generation 1-bit painting software program for the Apple Macintosh by Cricket Software. It followed MacPaint and was a competitor to Silicon Beach Software's SuperPaint. Like SuperPaint it was an early attempt to combine the separate graphic methods of bitmap and vector graphics.
Cricket Software already had a vector-only package called CricketDraw. The way it achieved this dualism was with a feature called WetPaint. This allowed the user to draw vector graphics and modify them in an object-oriented way like in Apple's MacDraw, for example, changing the size, stroke and fill. When satisfied, the user could click outside the object and Cricket Paint would convert the vector graphic into a bitmap and place it on the canvas, in a destructive edit. This package had some extra tools not found in MacPaint or MacDraw, such as the Spiral and Starburst, which drew radial lines.
This article deals with productivity software created for the Amiga line of computers and covers the AmigaOS operating system and its derivatives AROS and MorphOS. It is a split of the main article, Amiga software.
The Chessmaster 2000 is a computer chess game by The Software Toolworks. It was the first in the Chessmaster series and published in 1986. It was released for Amiga, Apple II, Atari 8-bit family, Atari ST, ZX Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, MSX, Macintosh, and IBM PC compatibles.
GrafX2 is a bitmap graphics editor inspired by the Amiga programs Deluxe Paint and Brilliance. It is free software and distributed under the GPL-2.0-only license.
OCP Art Studio or Art Studio was a popular bitmap graphics editor for home computers released in 1985, created by Oxford Computer Publishing and written by James Hutchby.
Dr. Halo is a raster graphics editor developed by Media Cybernetics and released for computers running MS-DOS. It was among the first graphics editors available for MS-DOS with its initial release in 1984. Media Cybernetics boasted about three million users of Dr. Halo between 1984 and 1993.
Dr. T's Music Software was a software company based in Massachusetts and founded in 1984 by Emile Tobenfeld. The company developed music software for the Atari ST, Commodore 64, Commodore 128, Amiga, and Macintosh. It operated until the mid-1990s.
