I primarily used
Deluxe Paint II and
Deluxe Paint Animation for the PC for several years. The PC versions of Deluxe Paint are fantastic in many ways, running perfectly well on even an
8086-based machine, and supporting a raft of graphics modes including
CGA,
EGA,
VGA and
MCGA and in later versions
XGA and enhanced
VGA. DPaint 2 also included a fantastic screengrabber called
Camera, which allowed me to dissect the graphics of all but the most
memory-intensive games and demos of the early 1990's.
Deluxe Paint in its various guises has been used in the creation of many games, from The Secret of Monkey Island all the way to Quake II and beyond. It is quite simply the best and most versatile pixel-level paint program. The interface of JASC's Paint Shop Pro is heavily influenced by Deluxe Paint. Deluxe Paint used several file formats: .LBM, .PCX and on the Amiga .IFF for pictures, .ANM for animations, .BBM for brushes, .ABM for animbrushes.
DPaint was originally coded for Electronic Arts (as an advanced version of a previous package called Paint) by Dan Silva, who went on to have an instrumental role in the development of 3D Studio. The manual of DP2 made the bold claim that "If Leonardo Da Vinci were alive today, he would probably be using Deluxe Paint". Deluxe Paint was generally marketed with an image of Tutankhamun's mask created in the program.