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I am bad at drawing my own stuff, but I should be able to make an okay copy, I thought. So, I processed two official arts of Uehara Meiko, one of the illustrators from the manga/show - a regular and a high-contrast low-res version, and printed them out.

The cling film is a very bad medium for drawing. It doesn't just move around, the pressure of the pen itself stretches the film. The next time I'll try to do something like that, I'll take a thick non-bendy film instead.

Despite the film being wonky, and my hands being attached to my body the way they are, the resulting lineart isn't half bad. I thought I should be able to fix it on the pixel-drawing stage.

There's quite a lot of learning curve.

First, the way PC Paintbrush handles mouse is horrendous. The cursor is 2x2 pixels blob, but with the smallest brush size, only bottom left of this 2x2 blob is drawn. On top of that, when you hold down the mouse and move it, the cursor is constantly redrawn - first with 2x2 white and then 2x2 black. This is very confusing, and it's hard to draw a pretty line.

Second, UNDO undoes the last tool. So, if you used your mouse to left a bunch of wide brush strokes, and didn't like the last one, UNDO will delete all the brush operations, not just the last stroke.

Third, there's keyboard mode, but it moves cursor in 4 pixel steps. To move the cursor in 1 pixel steps, one ought to hold Insert. The left click is F9. I almost got a carpal tunnel syndrome from that lmao.

I loaded Windows 3.1 (it's a 286 computer, after all), and its version of Paintbrush doesn't have mouse cursor issues. UNDO is still not an option.

Finally, you gotta look straight at the screen, or else!

The mouse I am using has a ball. It is clunky, and it is hard to draw "upwards". Soon I realized that the best way to control it is to find the uppermost point of a line, and pull the mouse towards myself. It's kind of like using... a brush, I guess?

By that time, I've made plenty mistakes of copying the lineart. I swear, it would've been better if I could use my keyboard. The resulting lineart is pretty bad. Windows runs in 800x600, so there's lots of pixels to fix. No one has time for this, I'd better try it again in a different program. But I try to apply flat colors. Gosh, Windows palette is so ugly.

I load msnet and copy original images from the file server. They look so much better...

But will they look good in 320x200x16?

As expected, low-res high-contrast version looks pretty good in PC Paintbrush 3, proportions aside.

To make PCPB load the image, I would have to: use GIMP to export BMP in "compatibility mode", then open BMP in Windows Paintbrush, and resize the image to 320x200, then save to PCX.

The reason for that is that PC Paintbrush assumes that the resolution of the image is the same as the resolution of your screen. I mean, what is even the point of having an image that ISN'T the same resolution of your screen, amirite?

The dithered version doesn't look nearly as good as it did in 800x600. It does feel like the palette is a bit "off", but I think the major reason is that dithering doesn't look all that good when your resolution is low, and it's applied to a large area.

Bonus image: PC Paint has a "zoom out" mode with a curious algorithm that is probably something that was left behind back in the 16-colour mode era.

Naturally, there were more than two graphic editors for 16-bit PCs. PC Paint (which is a totally different thing from PC Paintbrush) handles VGA much better than PC Paintbrush, and generally seems to be more usable. Its EGA mode is also OK.

I also have an "A4 Scan" editor, shipped as "PMTV" or "Image72". It doesn't work with PCX palettes correctly, though.

In the meantime, I almost finished writing my own ugly low-res graphics editor in BASIC. xD

ヤベ〜
I didn't code in QBasic since middle school. For whatever reason, I cannot define an array of 320x200, so 160x100 it is. I just wrote a double nested loop to fill out the RAM and the screen, then a While loop with a nested inkey-switch case that handles cursor, color picking (white, black, RGB), and exiting, and I'm dumping the RAM to a file.

This thing works neatly. It took me under 20 minutes to do a lineart in 160x100, so if BASIC could do 320x200, full EGA low-res probably would take me about an hour. It's a painting/cleaning up work after that, but it is much easier after you've done your lineart.

Well, are you ready to see the final result? XD

p.s. Yes, I know that 320x200x16 bit int = 128k, but I remember that 20 years ago I was able to handle large arrays somehow.

It's not terrible, but not impressive. As the image on the cling film was covering only a part of the screen, the resulting sprite is 71x59 pixels. Naturally, the pixels aren't square, but rather 1:1.2.

The "graphics editor" is 98 lines long, space and comments included, and as you can see, isn't worth any sort of preservation.

@darkling fancy, layers!

@nina_kali_nina I'm realising that my experience was about 5 years later tech (early '90s, ARM3) than what you're trying to do (late '80s, 80286), so it's a very different beastie. Similar principles, though.

@darkling the show says that this was used on 8-bit machines from early 80s, too.

@xot do you still have these arts somewhere? :)

@nina_kali_nina This is the only one I have handy, based on an iconic Bernie Wrightson page. This was drawn around 1985 on an Atari 800XL using a pirated copy of KoalaPainter modified for joystick.

@osr do you want it to be?:)

@nina_kali_nina
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djV11Xbc914