Software

Aseprite is a pixel-art and animation editor begun by David Capello in 2001 as the Allegro Sprite Editor, a free GPL program. It went on sale in 2014 while still open source, replaced the GPL with its own licence in August 2016, and is now developed by Igara Studio. Its source is still published but may not be redistributed. Indie developers use it widely, and it ships with palettes for machines from the Apple II to the ZX Spectrum.

DefleMask is a chiptune tracker by Leonardo Demartino ('Delek') that writes music for many machines' sound chips from one interface: the Mega Drive, Master System, Game Boy, PC Engine, NES, Commodore 64, Sega arcade boards, Neo Geo and MSX2. It began in 2011 as a tracker for a mobile-phone ringtone chip, was free for ten years, and since 2021 has been a paid program with the old version kept as a free demo.

Dan Silva's paint program, published by Electronic Arts for the Amiga in November 1985, became the standard tool for Amiga art and for the artists who drew the era's games. Silva wrote versions I to III, adding animation in 1989; Deluxe Paint IV (1991) added the Amiga's 4,096-colour HAM mode, and versions followed for the PC, Apple IIGS and Atari ST.

FamiTracker is a free Windows tracker by Jonathan Liss ('jsr') for writing music for the NES and Famicom sound chip. It emulates the console's five channels and six of the Famicom's cartridge sound chips, and saves NSF files that play on real hardware. Its source is published under the GPL, and after the last official release in 2015 the forks 0CC-FamiTracker and Dn-FamiTracker carried it on.

Impulse's 3D modelling, ray-tracing and animation package for the Amiga, written from scratch to replace its Turbo Silver and released at the turn of 1991. It added character animation, was given away complete on an Amiga Format coverdisk in 1993, and later moved to MS-DOS and Windows.

Allen Hastings and Stuart Ferguson's 3D modelling and animation package, given away with every NewTek Video Toaster from 1990 and sold on its own from 1994. On Toaster-equipped Amigas it made the space scenes of Babylon 5 and the submarine of seaQuest DSV, and it is still sold today.

ProTracker was a free Amiga music tracker, first released in 1990 by Lars 'Zap' Hamre of the group Amiga Freelancers. Built on NoiseTracker and the hacked SoundTrackers, it added timer-based tempo and a set of extended effects, and in later versions by other programmers it became the tracker most Amiga musicians used. Its 2.3 version is still maintained today as an open-source clone for modern computers.

Eric Graham's ray-tracing modeller, published by Byte by Byte of Austin, Texas, in the summer of 1987 for $99.95. It grew out of the software behind the famous Juggler demo, and became Animate 3D and then Sculpt-Animate 4D.

SID-Wizard is a music tracker written for the Commodore 64 by the Hungarian scener Hermit (Mihály Horváth), first released at the Árok party in July 2012. It runs on a real C64, drives up to four SID chips, takes MIDI input and exports tunes as SID files and C64 programs. Since 2022 a purpose-built emulator lets it run on modern computers too, and its code is free to reuse.

Ultimate Soundtracker, written by Karsten Obarski and first sold in Germany at the end of 1987, arranged sampled sounds on the Amiga's four sound channels in scrolling columns of notes, and saved songs with their samples as modules. It was a commercial product, but it spread through cracked and rewritten versions, NoiseTracker and ProTracker among them, and by 1990 a magazine reckoned almost every Amiga game and demo tune was written with it or one of its descendants.