8/16 Paint

8/16 Paint was quite possibly the most underrated paint program for the IIGS. I first caught on to its simplicity and feature set after being burnt more than once losing work to Paintworks Plus crashing whilst saving...after spending a great deal of time creating each of my 'masterpieces'.

It would have to be the best paint program available for IIGS' with only 512k of RAM. The program might not offer all the features of Deluxe Paint II, Paintworks Gold or Platinum Paint, but what the program does offer, it offers incredibly well, simply based on its stability and how fast the program runs. The best test of this is using the paint bucket - 8/16 Paint fills an area quicker than most other paint programs. All the other tools do exactly as you'd expect from their icons. The program also features what I feel is the most intuitive implementation of adding colour cycling to your images, which you can see when you load the sample images provided.

The '8/16' in the program's title reflects that there are actually four applications as part of this release - firstly, there are two 8-bit applications that run happily on 128k of RAM enabled Apple II machines, one that uses the 'hi-res' graphics mode (6 colours, 140x192 pixels) and 'double hi-res' graphics mode (16 colours, 140x192 pixels). The other two applications are privy to the IIGS only, the first utilising the 320 x 200 'super hi-res' graphics mode of the IIGS utilising 16 colours from a palette of 4096 colours. The second, 640, uses the 640 x 200 graphics mode that allows the use of 4 true colours that are dithered to create 16 colours. So the program provides a consistent way to paint in any of the most commonly used graphics modes on the Apple II.

On top of that, the program maintains its functionality and stability when run from any version of the IIGS operating system - including System 6.0.1.

All in all, the best way to paint on the IIGS when limited to 512k of RAM or for kids who are ready to move to the next creative level from paint programs designed specifically for kids (such as My Paint).