Dan Silva wrote the paint program he wanted to use himself. “What got me started in computer graphics is that I really like painting pictures on the computer,” he told Amazing Computing in 1989. “I just sat up nights to paint and implemented features so I could finish that painting. If something was too hard to do by hand, I would put in a feature to make it possible.” The result was Deluxe Paint, published by Electronic Arts for the Amiga in November 1985. By 1991 Computer Gaming World could describe it as an industry standard “used by virtually every publisher”.
Fast facts
- Education: master’s degree in mechanical engineering, Stanford.
- Before EA: NASA Ames, Lucasfilm and Xerox, where he wrote a black-and-white paint program called Doodle.
- Electronic Arts: left Xerox with others in 1983 to join EA at its start.
- Wrote: Deluxe Paint (1985), Deluxe Paint II (1986) and Deluxe Paint III (1989).
- After EA: left to go freelance around the start of 1990; by early 1991 he was working on a 3-D animation project for Autodesk.
From Doodle to Prism
After his master’s degree at Stanford, Silva worked for NASA Ames, Lucasfilm and Xerox. He told Amazing Computing that engineering had been useful training: “The courses in M-E design gave me a way of thinking about programs as products that a lot of programmers don’t have.” At Xerox he wrote Doodle, a black-and-white paint program; the Danish magazine Amiga Interface, which placed him at Xerox PARC, said it ran on Xerox’s Dandelion workstation, and quoted him describing Xerox as “very instructive, like a whole secondary-school education boiled down to one year” (in the magazine’s Danish), though frustrating, because Xerox’s management dropped many of his research group’s ideas.
In 1983 Silva was one of several people who left Xerox for the new Electronic Arts. There Doodle moved to the IBM PC, gained new features and became Prism, an in-house tool. When the Amiga arrived in 1985, Silva rewrote Prism for its graphics chips, and Deluxe Paint was the result. ACE dated its release to November 1985.
Deluxe Paint and its sequels
EA’s 1986 advertising listed what Deluxe Paint offered: unlimited brushes, which could be stretched, bent and rotated; blend, smear and shade; zoom with a split-screen magnified view; a palette mixer covering all 4,096 of the Amiga’s colours; high-resolution 640 × 400 painting; and colour cycling, which animates a picture by rotating part of its palette. Ahoy! recalled in 1987 that it had been one of the first packages for the Amiga 1000 and, unusually for software issued so early in a machine’s life, “a full-featured and effective graphics package”.
Deluxe Paint II followed a year later, and EA put Silva’s photograph in its advertising, as it did for its other “software artists”, with the line “A feast for the eyes. With perspective, pattern fill, stencil, anti-aliasing and much more.” Silva demonstrated it at SIGGRAPH in the summer of 1986, and Amazing Computing listed the additions: perspective plotting of brushes, drawing in the overscan area beyond the normal screen, better IFF support and a much improved manual. (Silva later remembered adding overscan “not long after DP2 shipped”, which suggests it came in a revision.) It felt “cleaner” and faster, which the magazine put down to Silva switching to the Manx C compiler.
Deluxe Paint III (1989) added animation, and Silva said it began with “one night of hacking”, when he got page flipping working. He wanted to move objects through perspective, found that sliding something along one frame at a time was painful, and built the Move requester to do it for him. Anim brushes followed, so that people who could not draw animation by hand could assemble moving clip art instead. For the first time he worked closely with beta testers, among them Jeff Bruette, who ran an Amiga graphics house in Hollywood, and the graphics artist Kara Blohm, and gave them credit for features such as the font requester, which came from what he called “incessant whining”. He also added the Amiga’s Extra Halfbrite mode, with 64 colours, and rewrote the colour cycling in assembly language. He left out HAM, the Amiga’s 4,096-colour mode: “Not that HAM isn’t useful; it’s just too hard!”
Some copies reached players before the shops. Silva told Amazing Computing that pirated copies circulated on bulletin boards before release, “some version that was probably 2.8” renumbered as 3.0, but that the real Deluxe Paint III, mostly sold as upgrades, was “basically flying out the door”; he thought the pirated copies might even have served as advertising.
Who used it
Game artists drew with it. Computer Gaming World described Lucasfilm Games painting the backgrounds and characters of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis “on screen with DPaint”, which it called “the classic Deluxe Paint method”. EA used a picture of Tutankhamun to show off each version, starting, Amiga Format recalled, with Avril Harrison’s 32-colour original.
Leaving Electronic Arts
By 1989 Silva was a research employee at EA who, Amiga Interface reported, worked mostly from home north of San Francisco and went in two or three days a week. He had worked on EA’s Macintosh paint program Studio/8, played keyboards and guitar, and said he was not much of a games player. Asked what came next, he said: “One of my fantasies is to integrate animation and music in a program that will sync actions and points in the music in a very easy way.”
In March 1990 Amazing Computing reported that he had left Electronic Arts and gone freelance, and wondered who would add HAM. The answer was Deluxe Paint IV (1991), which Amiga Format described as the only version not written by Silva, although it reused much of his code; the magazine later said HAM support was “a development that Dan Silva, the ‘inventor’ of DPaint, resisted”. In February 1991 Amazing Computing reported that “Amiga graphics whiz Dan Silva” was working on a 3-D animation project for Autodesk.
Sources
- “DeluxePaint III — The Inside Story”, interview with Dan Silva, Amazing Computing vol. 4 no. 9, September 1989: his education and career; Doodle and Prism; the origin of Deluxe Paint III; the Move requester, anim brushes and beta testers; Extra Halfbrite, HAM and colour cycling; pirated copies; his “fantasies”.
- Amiga Interface no. 3, 1989 (Denmark), profile by Peter Connor, pp. 15–16: Xerox, Doodle and the Dandelion; Prism in 1983; his working arrangements, Studio/8 and music.
- ACE issue 22, July 1989: Deluxe Paint first released in November 1985; Silva as author of Deluxe Paint III.
- Ahoy! issue 41, May 1987: review of Deluxe Paint II.
- Electronic Arts advertisements, AmigaWorld vol. 2 no. 3, May 1986 (Deluxe Paint’s features) and vol. 2 no. 6, November 1986 (Deluxe Paint II, with Silva’s photograph).
- Amazing Computing vol. 2 no. 1, January 1987: Deluxe Paint II, SIGGRAPH, its new features and the Manx compiler.
- Amazing Computing vol. 5 no. 3, March 1990: Silva leaves EA to go freelance.
- Amazing Computing vol. 6 no. 2, February 1991: the Autodesk project.
- Computer Gaming World issue 87, October 1991: Lucasfilm Games and “the classic Deluxe Paint method”.
- Amiga Format special issue 1, 1992: Deluxe Paint IV as the only version not written by Silva.
- Amiga Format issue 44, March 1993: Silva and HAM; Avril Harrison’s Tutankhamun.