The Graphics Magician, subtitled Picture Painter, was a picture tool for the
Apple II and later the Atari 8-bit,
Commodore 64 and IBM PC. Its pictures are not images. A .spc file holds the
drawing commands — move here, line to there, fill this region with that
pattern — and the picture only exists once a program has replayed them.
| Aspect | Detail |
|---|---|
| Written by | Mark Pelczarski and Jon Niedfeldt |
| Publisher | Penguin Software, 1982 (later Polarware) |
| Platforms | Apple II, Atari 8-bit, Commodore 64, IBM PC |
| Paintapp reads | .spc, Atari 8-bit variant |
Graphics Magician was sold to developers rather than to artists. Its playback routines could ship free inside a commercial product, so most publishers of the period took it up, and it became one of the best-selling programs of its day.
The point of the format was disk space. A full screen bitmap is 8 KB, and an adventure game wanted dozens of pictures on a 140 KB floppy. Storing the artist's strokes instead of the finished pixels cut a picture to a few hundred bytes, so a game could ship many times more pictures than bitmaps would have allowed. The cost was a visible second or two of redraw: anyone who remembers a 1980s adventure game painting a scene in line by line was watching a Graphics Magician playback routine at work.
Graphics Magician ended up under a great many commercial titles. No complete list survives; these are the known ones.
| Title | Publisher | Year |
|---|---|---|
| Transylvania | Penguin Software | 1982 |
| Dragon's Keep | Sierra On-Line | 1983 |
| Troll's Tale | Sierra On-Line | 1983 |
| The Quest | Penguin Software | 1983 |
| The Coveted Mirror | Penguin Software | 1983 |
| Crypt of Medea | Sir-Tech | 1984 |
| Xyphus | Penguin Software | 1984 |
| Oo-Topos | Penguin Software | 1984 |
| The Crimson Crown | Polarware | 1985 |
Penguin's later adventures ran on an engine of their own called Comprehend, which kept using Graphics Magician for its pictures.
The ports were not one format. The Apple II original draws on a 280 × 192 hi-res screen with a different color model, and the MS-DOS version used a different dialect again. Paintapp reads the Atari 8-bit variant only.
Paintapp runs the drawing program and hands you the finished picture: a
320 × 192 image on the Atari's four-color GR.15 playfield, with all 71 fill
patterns. Standalone .spc files are scarce, since the pictures shipped inside
games rather than as artwork.
Game disks are the richer source, and Paintapp looks inside them for you. Open an
Atari 8-bit .atr disk image and any Atari DOS
directory is listed as usual. Commercial games mostly booted from raw sectors with no
filesystem, so when there is no directory Paintapp scans the disk for valid drawing programs
and lists each one as a recovered picture. Penguin's Transylvania disk yields a
couple of dozen this way, including the title screen.
Expect a recovered picture to look sparse on its own. Games drew a room, then drew objects and characters into the same screen from separate programs, so one program is one layer of a scene, not the whole scene.
| Feature | Result |
|---|---|
| Brush stamps and text | Not drawn. The brush and character shapes live in each game's playback routine, not the picture file. Artists used brushes for texture and shading, so pictures that lean on them lose that detail |
| Malformed pictures | Declined rather than drawn. An unknown command or pattern would throw the rest of the stream out of step and turn the picture into noise |
| Apple II, C64 and IBM PC pictures | Not read; only the Atari 8-bit variant is implemented |