Oh, I haven’t been here for a long time.
Very good An Ode to Deluxe Paint. It made me think a few times and expand on the comment I made under the article. For some time I have been following the channel “Vix in Japan” where from time to time materials related to this software appear.
Deluxe Paint is very archaic software today. Interestingly, it is still suitable for several applications.
What was presented in the “memory” material, the idea of drawing simple images with low resolution and color space is very understandable to me. For the eventual young artist, Deluxe Paint had a much lower “barrier to entry”. It is true that computers were not so common back then, and those that offered 16-bit experiences were just entering households. What is immediately striking, unlike modern software, is a very simple, clear DP “interface”. There is no problem with higher resolution, because it is limited to basic modes. Simple brushes, a maximum palette of 256 colors. Serious limitations mean that people, having fewer tools to choose from, immediately start thinking about it. The process, sometimes the fun, is much more important than the image itself at the end. We start with a clean sheet of paper. Without a bank of “royality free” graphics, without generating “Ai”.
Today, when working with pixels, I work with the DP equivalent. A specialized tool, Pro Motion NG is modern, but to a large extent it has deliberately imposed limitations straight from the 90s.
Due to the width of the palette, PMNG is not suitable for working with digital photos. However, this software has many tools whose operation is similar to that in a modern graphic processing workshop. Tools such as layers, advanced selection system, distribution of graphic slices in the project, advanced undo, etc.
While working in these “two worlds” (retro pixel graphics and modern graphics), I often noticed that I like to go back to PMNG to rearrange some pixels rather than to Photoshop or the free GIMP to work on the material. I started to see an analogy in this when my younger son reaches for large “Duplo” bricks much more often than for small “Lego” bricks. Models are created much faster, despite the smaller number of elements. Much easier, because the elements are not very diverse and there is a smaller palette to choose from. The effect is much faster and the models are created from scratch.
I often observe the great difficulty of modern graphic arts students. When the first hours have to “fight for survival” in the maze of tools and options of modern Adobe software. It’s a pity that the software doesn’t have simpler tools “to start with”.
What do you think? Are simpler tools more productive?
I think simpler tools are faster to learn. But the true time-saving features are not in simpler tools and have a learning curve.
When you once master them, you will never look back to a simpler tool because you can’t live without the features anymore.
I moved from aseprite to pro motion and I can really tell you: pro motion is much more productive but it takes time to learn everything.
Probably you don’t need to learn everything at once.
Can you give hints about what was hard to understand or to find or to use?
Did you watch some of the tutorial videos? I still have about 30 to publish (need to cut/arrange them from Spanish sources and apply English narration, sub titles… takes me ages 
)
I’m at video 4 and still need a lot to learn so I can’t say much now
The restrictions of the colors for console was a bit too much (see other post).
Also at first look of the program I thought “wow! so many menus and buttons”, but after a while everything is very structured. (I switched from aseprite to pro motion)