NeoChrome was an early bitmap graphics editor for the Atari ST

Atari ST

The Atari ST is a home/personal computer that was released by Atari Corporation in 1985 and commercially available from that summer into the early 1990s. The "ST" officially stands for "Sixteen/Thirty-two", which referred to the Motorola 68000's 16-bit external bus and 32-bit internals...

 computer family. It was written by Dave Staugas, a system programmer at Atari

Atari Corporation

Atari Corporation was a manufacturer of computers and video game consoles from 1984 to 1996. Atari Corp. was founded in July of 1984 when Warner Communications sold the home computing and game console divisions of Atari to Jack Tramiel. Its chief products were the Atari ST, Atari XE, Atari 7800,...

 and co-author of the ST's operating system.

Along with the first Amiga versions of Deluxe Paint

Deluxe Paint

Deluxe Paint is a bitmap graphics editor series originally created by Dan Silva for Electronic Arts .The original version was created for the Commodore Amiga and was released in November 1985...

, NeoChrome was one of the earliest mainstream bitmap editors to use the then-novel graphical user interface

Graphical user interface

In computing, a graphical user interface is a type of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices with images rather than text commands. GUIs can be used in computers, hand-held devices such as MP3 players, portable media players or gaming devices, household appliances and...

.

An early sampler version (v0.5) was released as part of the system disks of the first STs. A "proper" version 1.0 arrived later, and was bundled with several versions of the ST. Although not officially public domain

Public domain

Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...

, this version was often treated as such, and was never actually sold.

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

DEGAS (software)

DEGAS and DEGAS Elite are bitmap graphics editors created by Tom Hudson for BatteriesIncluded.- File formats :- External links :* - See also :* NeoChrome* List of raster graphics editors...

 and Deluxe Paint

Deluxe Paint

Deluxe Paint is a bitmap graphics editor series originally created by Dan Silva for Electronic Arts .The original version was created for the Commodore Amiga and was released in November 1985...

.

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

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.

External links

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