gameboy painter

>gameboy painteris a painting program for the original
gameboy which i programmed for my m.a. thesis
in editorial design and publishing at isia urbino. painter
let's the user draw pixel-based images with tools
inspired by macpaint for the classic macintosh: pencil,
spray paint and fill bucket, implementing a palette
of all the three gameboy colours in addtion to patterns.
it supports the gameboy pocket printer to print the
drawings realised with the program onto thermal paper.
gameboy painter, or gbp, was written in c with gbdk.
graphics were designed inspired by the xerox alto and
star 8081 grahical user interface, which were also
part of my thesis research. i mostly acquired pictures
from bruce damer's digibarn which is an amazing
resource of data on old sytems, especially xerox ones.
          the graphics were first sketched on paper,
or directly drawn on photoshop on a 8x8 pixels or more
canvas, then redrawn with gameboy tile designer
and gameboy map builder, two amazingly helpful apps
which are free and run great on wine or crossover.
it was built as a companion program of gameboy writer,
which shares the same graphics elements but was
made to write text and print it, being a word processor.
both gameboy writer and painter are part of project
8kb;4mb;dmg, in which i explored how much i could fit
into the original gameboy capabilities to be able to
make graphics with such a device in today's scenario.
originally, only writer was supposed to be compiled,
since the engine behing painter was only constructed
to support variable width fonts typing, and not to be
its own application. thoguh, when the prototype version
of gameboy writer was finished for the presentation
of my thesis project, i went back on my old project files
to see if maybe i could build a companion app to the
gameboy writer. i quickly made a prototype of it, which
takes the suffix c (a was the old writer without vwf, b
is the suffix for writer prototypes). initially it just had one
tool and could paint in black, in three different sizes.
          2025.07.06: i thought including a collection
of drawings made by users online would be the perfect
addition to the thesis book. so i thought of sharing
online a prototype of the program to ask users to draw
something with it, then sending it to me via e-mail,
via form on the website or publish them on the thread
published on gbdk-dev and gbdev on discord.

→ gameboy painter tester program
→ made with gameboy painter

the current version of gameboy painter isn't finished yet,
but it is stable enough to be tested. it's been tested
on both emulators, namely bgb, which i recommend for
testing since it's very strict, and the original gameboy.
when booted up, it greets the user with a splashscreen,
see [1], then jumps directly into drawing mode, with
pencil being the default tool. here the user can move the
cursor around using the dpad. pressing a draws onto
the canvas. pressing start cycles through the app menus:



palette menu, the tools menu and the main menu.
when selecting a tool, the colour menu will the open and
the user is able to select one of the three shades of
grey that are displayable by the gameboy, see [2], [5], [6].
i will put on the right a demonstration of all the tools
currently implemented in the app, plus some real photos.




[1] gameboy painter splashscreen.

[2] gameboy painter pencil tool in the three colours.
     drawing is performed by pressing a.




[3] pencil tool in various sizes. they can be toggled using
     select + up and down .

[4] the eraser is called by pressing b and uses the pencil
     size that was set when drawing.




[5] the spray paint tool. the ink splatters are sprayed by
     randomly selecting one of the spray patterns.

[6] the fill tool. patterns can be selected by pressing both
     select + left and right .




[7] when printing, the screen goes blank for a bit.
     with start cycle to the menu and then press a to print.