Get Info: #deneba

“The Famous F40” vector illustration by David Rumfelt

by Matt Sephton — Sat, 15 Jul 2023 17:25:00 +0000

I was looking through some old Macintosh CD-ROMs, searching for my usual things that I do whenever I add new discs to my collection: hanafuda, specific artists, favourite software, plugins for said favourite software, and so on. Whilst I was deep in the filesystem I stumbled across some old sample files from Deneba Canvas and noticed how they were all credited to the artist.

Intrigue got the better of me so I did a quick google and came up with a post on the Canvas GFX website (yes, the software still exists!) about David Rumfelt and his most famous work: a cutaway illustration of a Ferrari F40.

Thanks to my Patreon supporters for their help and encouragement with this type of content.

Going back to the files on the CD, I found the artwork for The Famous F40! It was alongside another detailed cutaway piece called The Famous Harley. In the folder containing the artwork files there was an important looking Read Me document:

Effectively immediately, all uses of the F-40 and Harley image by Deneba or third-party vendors MUST include one of the following tag lines in the credits: “Original art by David Kimble. Electronically re-created in Canvas by Deneba Software” or “Original art by David Kimble. Electronically re-created in Canvas by Deneba Software artist Dave Rumfelt.”

These days we would just call it a vector illustration, but at the time I guess there must have been some fun discussions as to both the legality of this piece of work—a copy of a piece of art originally created by somebody else—and also how it should be described to minimise the outrage David describes when he recalls creating the piece.

Original art by David Kimble. Electronically re-created in Canvas by Deneba Software artist Dave Rumfelt.

Time travel

The F40 is a mind blowing piece of work and is reported to feature around 28,000 vector objects. It’s a very good imitation of the original illustration by the legendary David Kimble on which it is based.

I recorded a short video showing me zooming, scrolling, and watching it redraw. Finally I ungroup everything a handful of times to count the total number of vector objects. This is running in an emulator of a Macintosh with System 7.5 and 64MB RAM, though the illustration only requires around 8MB RAM. Maybe this will transport you back through time to when you were young!?

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s Canvas—and most other contemporary illustration software—did not draw lines smoothly using the process known as anti-aliasing. This was for a combination of performance reasons (you need the artwork to redraw quickly) and hardware limitations (computers didn’t have GPU acceleration and displays often ran with limited colours). The resulting image has lines with aliasing—a distinct pixel stepping—and gradient fills that are not very smooth. Though I feel that a lot of the gradient fills in this piece are deliberately using banding for similar technical reasons.

After playing around in Canvas for a while, I decided to see if I could get a higher quality version of the file. Rather than struggle making 30-year-old software do something it would rather not, I exported the Canvas file as an EPS and moved to modern macOS. Importing it into modern Acorn allowed me to export a higher quality, smooth, anti-aliased version of the illustration that you see at the top of this page. But why stop there?

Scrollable 20-megapixel version

You can scroll around this image or right click and open it in a new tab to see it in all its glory.

Notes

Eagle-eyed viewers may notice that this version of the F40 differs slightly from the one shown on the Canvas GFX web page. The Canvas file I have from 1994 is some missing elements, such as the metalwork between the petrol cap and petrol tank. It is also comprised of around 16,000 vector objects, around two thirds of the reported number. Also of note is the image on the Canvas GFX website appears to be either squished horizontally or stretched vertically.

Downloads

The Famous F40, PDF file (2MB, direct download)
The Famous F40, Canvas file as SIT (10MB, direct download)
The Famous F40, Canvas file on CD-ROM (400MB, link to download page)

Playdate 1-bit illustration postmortem

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday saw the opening of pre-orders for Playdate, a new handheld gaming device that I’m developing some games for. To celebrate the occasion I drew an illustration in 1-bit with dither patterns using Macintosh System 7.

This kind of style is most associated with HyperCard, which provides a bunch of great drawing tools and modes, and can be seen in many period pieces of interactive media, animations, art and video games.

I’ve been revisiting the artwork of Thoru Yamamoto recently, which I think influenced the style of this piece.

Toolbox

My tool of choice on System 7 is Deneba artWORKS because it supports multiple layers, a ton of external tools (plugins), and has a good workflow for vector and pixels. Plus, I use it on iPad Pro with Apple Pencil which makes the whole experience an absolute pleasure.

Some established Macintosh artists have questioned both my use of modern technology and my drawing techniques. Hopefully this post will give a little more insight into how I go about things.

Playdate

I first drew the body of the Playdate using Rounded Rectangles for the perimeter, screen, crank, d-pad, speaker grille and using Ovals for the buttons and corner screws. This was all done by eye, no measuring.

Afterwards I grouped all those shapes and used the Point Rotate external tool to rotate the group by an arbitrary amount until it looked like a fun enough jaunty angle.

Next, in the Layers Manager I set the shape layer to be greyed out and created a new layer to do some drawing. I used the Paintbrush tool with small circular brush to draw over the shapes by hand, erasing any mistakes and redrawing some sections of lines until I was happy.

Colouring

Given the nature of 1-bit there is no concept of colours only patterns of black and white to simulate different shades of grey. I could have drawn in colour and had the system convert to dither patterns, but I want to have manual control over the shades.

I first picked the dither pattern for the main “yellow” body and then picked the paler, more sparse, dither patterns for the steel crank handle, drop shadows and background. Fills were applied to closed areas using the Paint Can (flood fill) tool.

Details

I used the Paintbrush and Pencil tools to add in some details like the dots on the buttons and my hand-drawn version of the Playdate logo. The shadow was drawn freehand using the Paintbrush tool with a larger circular brush size. The background pattern is a simple sparse dither pattern applied using the Paint Can tool.

Party Up!

For pre-order day I thought it would be fun to add an extra layer to the illustration making it more celebratory. I had the idea to replicate the 🥳 emoji (Face with Party Horn and Party Hat) with the Playdate I’d already drawn.

Horn

This was drawn using a combination of freehand Brush tool and filled vector Polygons. Some extra shading is done using the Brush tool and a sparse dither pattern. I must have drawn a handful of different style horns, settling on the one that looked least like Playdate was smoking!

Hat

This was drawn as a vector path using the Polygon tool, and filled with a dithered pattern using the Gradient Fill tool. The frilly stuff on top of the hat is a handful of Arcs drawn in various directions, always starting from the tip.

Confetti

For the confetti I didn’t want to draw each one by hand, and I wanted them to be vectors rather than pixels so they remained as editable as possible. I found that drawing very short curved strokes using the Pressure Pen tool produced shapes that looked a lot like tiny squares of paper bent at some 3D angle. Using this tool without any pressure means it performs as a dynamic, vector calligraphic pen. A nice little trick!

Afterwards I applied one of the many standard fill patterns to each piece of confetti to give them a bit of individual flavour. Any confetti overlaying the Playdate body was duplicated, made white, and offset by a pixel or two to help make it stand out from the body. You can see this most clearly on the coil shape at the right side of the Playdate screen.

Jazz

The extra geometric shapes in amongst the confetti are my attempt at bringing a bit of 1980s Memphis Group design aesthetic to the illustration. I use a variety of different external tools for this: Spiral (length 2), Fractals (default wiggle and density), Coil and Resistor. The later two tools are meant for drawing electrical circuits! The moral of the story: know your tools and use them!

Positioning

After adding all the confetti and jazz, I adjusted the positions and sizes of many of the objects to produce what I thought was the most pleasing distribution. The benefits of all of these objects being vectors becomes clear at this point!

Motion

I used the Arc tool to add motion lines to the party horn and crank. Lastly I added some straight lines to imply that the light on the power button is flashing.

Pixel or Vector?

Looking at the objects that make up the drawing, I’d say that the split is around 75% vector to 25% pixel, which is the same across most of my drawings.

Pixels make up large freeform areas, filled vector shapes make up large defined areas. Small objects that will remain static use pixels, and those that I think will need to be moved or resized use vectors.

I tend to draw on the base layer with pixels and then use higher layers as rough groups for sets of vector shapes. For example, the confetti was all drawn on one layer.

Post-processing

I saved out the image as a GIF (another external tool provides this capability) and loaded it into DeBabelizer, or sometimes Photoshop 3.0. Here I resized using simple sampling to 990px square from the original size of 330px square.

Finally, I copied the file to BasiliskII emulator File Sharing drive at which point it became accessible in Files in iPadOS, and from here I sent it to my iPhone via AirDrop, after which I used the Twitter app to add the image to a tweet and hit send!

Job done.

Keyboard craving

I drew this late at night and was too lazy to go and find my Bluetooth keyboard. Next time I’ll definitely make the effort to find it. That way I can use my spare hand do keyboard shortcuts and to nudge positions using the cursor keys. I should really add cursor keys to the emulator’s custom keyboard.

Let me know your thoughts on Twitter using the comments link below.

Mixing External Tools across Deneba software

by Matt Sephton — Sun, 25 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

One of the most interesting things about Deneba’s early 1990s Macintosh drawing apps is that they were built in a modular way with additional files adding specific features. These days we call those Plugins but back in 1990 Deneba referred to them as External Tools.

They are first seen in UltraPaint and later in Canvas 3.0, artWORKS and Canvas 3.5. Tools are categorised as several types: Effect, I/O, Manager, Modifier, Object, Setting and Other. Each adds functionality and/or user interface to the app in its own way.

Amongst the Deneba material on an AppleLink archive disk from Spring 1993 there are a bunch of “non-shipping” tools labelled for use with Canvas 3.0. Interestingly, they are listed individually and also as a combined set. If we extract the combined set of tools there’s a single additional tool that is somewhat out of place: the Waco Tool (for Wacom pressure sensitive pen) which is marked with UltraPaint’s type and creator information.

I can confirm this that this tool - which I don’t believe was ever included with UltraPaint - allows my Wacom ArtPad II to work. Bonus! But why was this tool meant for UltraPaint included in a download for Canvas. Could it work in Canvas?

I put the additional files in the Canvas Tools folder and started the app with the Space Bar held down. This starts the Tool Picker allowing you to select which tools you want to use for that session.

Boom! There it was.

Experimentation

I tried copying some tools from Canvas to UltraPaint and artWORKS. They didn’t work. What was the difference? In ResEdit they looked largely the same. On a whim I looked at the type/creator codes using Snitch’s Get Info extension. I noticed that disabled tools had a different type code. If the app is using type to store information like that, maybe it’s only accepting certain type codes?

So I copied a tool from Canvas over to artWORKS, being careful to pick one that already exists so it was as much like for like as it could be. It didn’t show up. Then I changed the type/creator codes and… it did show up! And not only that, but the tool worked in the app!

I was surprised, and also impressed. Deneba did a really great job with the architecture and API of these apps for things to remain this compatible over the course of several years. All three apps share code and resources. If you take a look at both UltraPaint and artWORKS in ResEdit you’ll see that they share a lot of DNA, artWORKS is basically an enhanced version of UltraPaint. I’d bet all three apps were built from the same code base.

How far can we go?

Some questions remained: how many tools could this be done with? Would they install and function? Could I use tools in artWORKS that were meant only for the more expensive Canvas? There was only one way to find out: try all the tools!

I set about copying the tools from one app to artWORKS, my favourite app, changing the creator and type codes to match. To make bulk changes to type/creator I used Get Info (with Snitch) on multiple items, but I could have used software such as FileTyper.

Year	Software	Type	Creator
1990	UltraPaint	TOOL	ULTR
1992	Canvas 3.0	TOL2	DAD2
1993	artWORKS	TOL4	DAD3

Very far!

The result was quite amazing with artWORKS total tools increasing from 59 to 92—that’s 33 additional tools! This is not counting a handful of tools that install but do not present themselves in the user interface. I’ll need to investigate those further at a later date.

Doing the same for Canvas 3.0 takes us from 74 to an even higher total of 97 tools! It’s worth noting there are a couple of tools that go by the same internal name: PANTONE™ Colors (Color Manager) and Separations (PostScript) but I’ve chosen not to merge those rows of the table as there are some subtle differences in their capabilities. Also the functionality of the Grids & Rulers tool is built-in.

The table below shows tools present in each of the apps, each with their own symbol, and then the final combined column shows all tools that are compatible with artWORKS with the symbols showing which app that tool originated from.

External Tools

Software Name	UltraPaint	Canvas 3.0	artWORKS	artWORKS+	Canvas 3.0+
Tool Loader			■	■	■
ToolPicker	▲	●	■	■	●
Alignment Specs		●	■	■	●
Antialias			■	■	■
Arrowhead Manager		●	■	■	●
Auto Trace	▲	●	■	■	●
Balloon Help		●	■	■	●
Bézier Text		●		●	●
Bind		●			●
Blend Objects		●	■	■	●
Blotter Pen	▲		■	■	■
Brush Manager		●	■	■	●
Canvas 1.0 I/O		●		●	●
Canvas 2.1 I/O		●	■	■	●
CGM I/O		●		●	●
Chalk	▲		■	■	■
Charcoal	▲		■	■	■
Coil		●		●	●
Color Manager	▲		■	■
Combine Objects		●	■	■	●
Concentric Circles		●		●	●
Contrast	▲			▲	▲
Convert To		●	■	■	●
Cube	▲	●	■	■	●
Cylinder		●		●	●
Dash Manager		●		●	●
Dimensioning		●		●	●
Doughnuts		●		●	●
Drawing Size		●	■	■	●
Dropper	▲	●	■	■	●
Duplication Specs		●	■	■	●
DXF I/O		●		●	●
Filters			■	■	■
Fingertip	▲		■	■	■
Fractals		●		●	●
Fuzz lasso/Soften Edges	▲		■	■	■
GIF I/O	▲	●	■	■	●
Gradient Fill	▲	●	■	■	●
Gray Scale Manager	▲			▲	▲
Grid Specs		●		●	●
Grid Tool/Maker	▲	●		●	●
Grids & Rulers			■	■
Hatch Patterns		●		●	●
IGES I/O		●		●	●
Illustrator I/O		●	■	■	●
Imported Filters			■	■	■
Impressionist	▲			▲	▲
Layer Specs		●	■	■	●
Luminance	▲		■	■	■
MacDraw I/O	▲	●	■	■	●
MacPaint I/O	▲	●	■	■	●
Magic Wand	▲		■	■	■
Masking	▲		■	■	■
Mover		●	■	■	●
Multigon	▲	●	■	■	●
NameStamp		●		●	●
Object Specs		●	■	■	●
Object Tint		●		●	●
PANTONE™ Colors		●		○	●
Parallel Lines		●		●	●
Pattern Manager		●	■	■	●
Pen Manager		●		●	●
Place		●		●	●
Point Rotate		●		●	●
PostScript			■	■
Preferences		●	■	■	●
Pressure Pen	▲	●	■	■	●
QuickTime		●	■	■	●
Quill Pen	▲		■	■	■
Registration Marks		●		●	●
Resistor		●		●	●
RGB Color Manager		●		●	●
Rubber Stamp	▲		■	■	■
Ruler Specs		●		●	●
Scale Specs		●	■	■	●
Search & Replace		●		●	●
Selection Specs		●		○	●
Separations		●		○	●
Sharpen and Blur	▲			▲	▲
Size Other			■	■	■
Slides		●			●
Smart Mouse		●		○	●
Sounder		●	■	■	●
Spacing Other			■	■	■
Spelling		●		●	●
Spiral		●		●	●
Split		●	■	■	●
Spray Manager		●	■	■	●
StartupScreen I/O	▲	●	■	■	●
System 7.0 Options		●	■	■	●
Text Ruler		●		○	●
Text Utilities		●		●	●
Textures			■	■	■
Three Color Airbrush	▲		■	■	■
TIFF I/O	▲	●	■	■	●
TimeStamp		●		●	●
Tool Info		●	■	■	●
UltraPaint 1.0 I/O		●	■	■	●
Undo Killer		●		○	●
Water Droplet	▲		■	■	■
Total Tools	30	74	58	92	97

Key:

▲ UltraPaint tool ● Canvas 3.0 tool (○ that installs but doesn’t show any interface) ■ artWORKS tool

Result

So after all this I now have an install of artWORKS (let’s call it artWORKS+) that includes additional tools from both UltraPaint and Canvas 3.0 and I had a ton of fun figuring all this out. And I’m only 30 years late!

Here’s a download of my artWORKS Tools folder containing all the combined tools (use StuffIt! Expander 5.5 to extract): artWORKS-Tools-Combined.sit [1.1MB]

Footnote

A note about later versions of Canvas: version 3.5 provides roughly the same tools as version 3.0. The handful of unique tools in version 3.5 are not compatible with artWORKS. Version 5.0 features similar tools but they’re no longer compatible with the earlier apps.

Turning an iPad Pro into the Ultimate Classic Macintosh
How to install BasiliskII on your iPad
Exploring Custom Keyboards and Automation
Optimising Macintosh app toolbars for touch
Macintosh drawing software compared
Mixing External Tools across Deneba software
My System 7 software choices
About the interoperability of System 7 and iOS

History of DenebaCAD

by Matt Sephton — Fri, 09 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I recently stumbled across a series of Facebook posts about the origins of DenebaCAD, from humble beginnings as MasterCAD on Atari ST, of all unlikely places. The app still exists today as DCAD VectorSpace. Here I provide the story translated from Spanish into English.

Year	Title	Platform	Distribution
1988	MasterCAD	Atari ST	Retail
1989	User’s CAD	Macintosh	Beta
1991	ArchiDOT 2.0	Macintosh	Retail
1992	ArchiDOT 3.0	Macintosh	Retail
1997	DenebaCAD	Macintosh	Retail

This breakthrough CAD software was created by Hernán Pisani at INDI C.A. (Calle Madrid, Qta. El Pilar, Las Mercedes, Caracas, Venezuela).

The below is taken from Metamorfosis 3D on Facebook with the text presented in full below, albeit translated from Spanish using DeepL.

In 1988 and MasterCAD was sold to the world by several @ATARI distributors. MasterCAD was present in several industrialized countries and version 2.0 was presented at the COMDEX in Las Vegas from November 14 to 19, 1988. In that year the program was reviewed in different specialized publications such as ST WORLD of England, ST INFORMER, STAR, CURRENT NOTES of the United States totaling 17 pages of dedication by them. Due to the limited presence of Atari computers in the professional world, despite the power of the Atari 1040 ST, it was decided to opt for the support of the Apple Latin America initiative for local developers and an agreement was reached with Atari Venezuela leaving them the MasterCAD product in the ATARI environment as far as the development had reached and continue with the technology they had developed in Macintosh, which was undoubtedly a larger market. Thus began the development of a beta version of ArchiDOT which they called User’sCAD, a considerably more powerful and user friendly product.

In 1989 the development of the pilot project of a product that was thought to be called user User’sCAD and that later would be launched on the market under the name of ArchiDOT (Architectural Design Oriented Tool) began. Already here it was realized that the development of the product should be oriented only to architectural design and not pretend to solve problems of other engineering, in order not to complicate the tool pretending to also solve different thought processes and running the risk that the tool would no longer be intuitive. The program was based on Mac II and Mac SE hardware with the support of the A.C.E. program of APPLE Corp represented in Venezuela by PLUS SISTEMAS. This development, still in Alpha phase, was presented at the WORLWIDE DEVELOPERS CONFERENCE held in San Jose California in May 1989, receiving comments of praise from the representative of APPLE Latin America and other members of the Apple Staff as well as from the representatives of the Tecnológico de Monterrey.

In 1990 the CADD Room was inaugurated at the Simon Bolivar University. Hernan to date had spent 20,000.00 architect-hours of analysis and 11,000.00 hours of programming accumulated from the origin to User’sCAD, an architecture-oriented CAD. Its version ß3 participated in the Latin American Software contest in May 1990, competing with the finished applications and being in sixth place with mention (first place in CAD), receiving comments of praise from Apple Computer’s staff representatives. In December 1990 it was presented with a booth at the DATA 90 exhibition in Miami, Florida. User’sCAD was selected in 1991 as the resident application in the laboratories of advanced design techniques at the School of Architecture of the Simon Bolivar University, Caracas, as a subject of the curriculum for two quarters. At that time the application, for marketing and identification reasons, the name User’sCAD was replaced by ArchiDOT 2.0 (Architectural Design Oriented Tool). In Venezuela alone, 150 architecture and construction companies successfully produced drawings with the program and successfully with Hernán’s program and consulting services.

In 1992 a work done in ArchiDOT was presented at Harvard University. Diego Diaz, using a Mac IIci of the time and ArchiDOT version 3.0, presented his independent study work as part of his master’s degree at Harvard University and received an evaluation and recommendation of the software by the computer lab of the GSD (Graduate School of Design).

In 1993 CADSOFT, the company founded by Hernan, starts again the international marketing with the opening of the Spanish market and ArchiDOT passes the necessary quality control tests for this demanding market. Our distributor in Spain: The company Microgestió in Barcelona is in charge of distributing the software in their authorized Apple stores. On the other hand, also in 1993, Architect Carlos Pollak (Head of CADD USB Room) recently presented a paper at the World Congress of Architectural Education (Prague 1993) on the use of ArchiDOT in design education. As a result of the good role played by the product, Apple Czech Republic showed interest in distributing it in that country.

Between 1994 and 1995 ArchiDOT was shown to several software houses in the United States and attracted the interest of Deneba Software. ArchiDOT was written up to that time in Symantec Pascal, a good language that was used to its full potential but was clearly insufficient for the development of a world class CAD version. They ported, through the use of the PtoC converter, the Pascal code and the mathematical algorithms of ArchiDOT to the C++ language in its implementation “Code Warrior” of Metrowerks, to give birth to a much superior application in speed and performance, generating laboratory versions that were tested by several users among which I was. It was amazing at that time the image quality that we could achieve with that version that could only be surpassed with render engines years later. The conversion process from Pascal to C++ was in charge of Eng. Federico Zappi. The next step was the development of the new interface that was in charge of Architect Hernan Pisani and Mr. Doug Levy, vice-president of Deneba Software. All this happened after signing a publishing contract with Deneba Software, which gave birth to Deneba CAD.

UltraPaint Manual

by Matt Sephton — Tue, 06 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I received a package from America: the 30-year-old manual for UltraPaint, Deneba Systems’ Macintosh graphics program. It doesn’t get much more exciting for me than this!

I love how the Option key in printed material from this era looks more like a 2-way switch symbol from an electrical circuit diagram than it does today.

Similar Books

The contents of the manual are very naïve compared to today, talking you through how to use menu items and dialog boxes. UltraPaint (and it’s follow-up artWORKS) was a sister app to Canvas. If you’re looking for something with the same tone and content as the manual, check out Deke McClelland’s Canvas 3.0: The Book over at Internet Archive.

Dear Reader

If by chance you have some old Deneba Systems software for Macintosh that you’d be happy to sell then please get in touch. Specifically I’d like to buy copies of UltraPaint, artWORKS and Canvas 3.0 or 3.5. I don’t mind what condition they are in, I’m sure it adds character!

Changing the size of toolbar items using ResEdit

by Matt Sephton — Sun, 28 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I just finished increasing the size of toolbar icons in Deneba artWorks from 24x16 to 24x24.

Easily done by finding the dialog that contains these icons, and resizing the canvas of each related PICT.

Several trips between ResEdit and Photoshop (version 1.0!) and I was done.

This is to make the tool buttons easier to tap with my thumb when running System 7 on iPad.

I love this “hackable” nature of early Macintosh systems. Palm OS is very similar in that regard.

Why moan about an app not being to your liking when you can DIY!?