NeoChrome

NeoChrome v1.0 with the famous image of a waterfall. This could be used to demonstrate NeoChrome's colour cycling animation facility.

NeoChrome was an early bitmap graphics editor for the Atari ST computer family.^[1] It was written by Dave Staugas, a system programmer at Atari and co-author of the ST's operating system.

Along with the first Amiga versions of Deluxe Paint, NeoChrome was one of the earliest mainstream bitmap editors to use the then-novel graphical user interface.

An early sampler version (v0.5)^[1][2] was released as part of the system disks of the first STs.^[1] A "proper" version 1.0 arrived later, and was bundled with several versions of the ST. Although not officially public domain, this version was often treated as such, and was never actually sold.^[1]

As a result of this, NeoChrome enjoyed a relatively high level of popularity within the ST community, even in the face of more advanced packages such as DEGAS Elite and Deluxe Paint.

Although there were no further official versions,^[1] an unofficial revision called NeoChrome Master was released in the early 1990s.^[3]

NeoChrome Master

NeoChrome Master was built by reassembling the binary program "NeoChrome 1.0". The resulting source code was uncommented and hard to read. But it could be assembled back into the same binary program as before. This allowed the author to extend the program.

Many extension were built into the program and various version were released to the public.

References

1. ^ ^{a b c d e} http://alive.atari.org/alive10/esneo.php
2. ^ Page 6 Atari Users' Magazine - Issue 28
3. ^ http://dhs.nu/files.php?t=pixelpainter

External links

• Animated NeoChrome demo image using colour cycling (requires Java)