ChromaStudio ST...

ChromaStudio would have been the ST 'prequel' to Apex Media on the Falcon. It was also a graphics package designed to be capable of animation/multiframe editing but the emphasis was more towards high colour painting, which was a challenge on the ST machines and seemed like a good way to build on the PhotoChrome tech.

Spectrum512 and QuantumPaint existed in this territory already, but I wanted to take a slightly different approach - the image would be represented internally as a 24bit truecolour framebuffer with all operations working in that format, but the display would undergo continuous reduction to PCS display system.

Approximate on-the-fly reduction would occur when the CPU was busy maintaining the display - with more expensive, higher quality reduction at quiet intervals. Heavy realtime operations would resort to separate R, G, B fields which would be strobed to give an approximation of the framebuffer without tying up the CPU during a task. Less interactive operations would pause the display and use ad-hoc or dirty-rectangle updates.

Work began on it before Apex, but trailed off as focus moved to the Falcon. All that exists is this limited demo.

The most difficult part of the program was not the display, or the painting tools or any of the other interesting stuff - providing a reliable mouse cursor with the PCS display running caused most of the real pain. I did solve this eventually but was already concentrating on the Falcon by that point. Had the mouse been solved sooner I would have got a lot more done on it!

ChromaStudio was built around the 1993-95 timeframe in 100% 68000 assembly language.