Simulant CPC Paint (SimPaint) v1.0 is now available.
SimPaint is a complete pixel-art and painting package for the Amstrad CPC, heavily inspired by Deluxe Paint on the Amiga: a menu bar along the top, a tool strip down the side, the palette to hand and a single key for every tool. Pick up any part of your picture as a brush and paint with it using any tool. Priced at £10, it runs on every CPC from a 464 with a disc drive up to the 6128 Plus.
Features include:
Drawing tools – freehand, line, curve, rectangle, circle, ellipse and polygon (hollow or filled), airbrush, fill, and mirror for symmetrical drawing. Left button paints the ink, right button the paper, with every tool.
Brushes – square and round brushes in a range of sizes, plus custom brushes picked up from your picture that you can flip and resize. Clone copies one part of a picture to another as you paint.
All three screen modes – MODE 0, MODE 1 and MODE 2, with conversion between them. Every tool works in every mode.
Magnifier and zoom – a split-screen magnifier showing the whole picture and a close-up side by side, and you can draw in either half.
Colours and palettes – mix your own inks from the CPC’s 27 colours, or 4096 on a 6128 Plus, pick up any colour from the picture, and load or save palettes in OCP Art Studio format.
Overscan – open, paint and save full-screen pictures that fill the borders, and turn any picture into one. Saved overscans run on their own from BASIC.
Text, fonts and fill patterns – type straight onto your picture in the CPC’s font or one loaded from disc, and fill regions with OCP Art Studio pattern sets. Three original fonts and two pattern sets are included.
Files – opens OCP Art Studio, FreeOCP and ConvImgCpc pictures, and saves in OCP format or packed to save disc space.
Four languages – English, Spanish, French and German, built-in help pages included.
On a 6128 Plus, SimPaint mixes inks from the full 4096-colour palette and uses the hardware sprite as a smooth pointer. Any 128K machine adds multi-level undo and redo, curve, clone, filled polygons, fonts, fill patterns, larger brushes and whole-page overscan editing. Everything works from the keyboard or a joystick, and AMX / Genius and SYMBiFACE II mice are supported.
The download is two .dsk images: the program disc, and an art disc holding 15 example pictures across all three modes, Plus and overscan, colour-cycling pictures, 36 brushes all drawn in SimPaint itself, extra fonts and fill patterns, and a picture show that runs on any CPC without the program. The full manual is included.
Purchase link: Simulant CPC Paint - DPaint on the Amstrad
I know there are some very talented artists on our platform who could do better than me (or me just reusing Amiga artwork to show off what the program is capable of)…
