TVPaint on 68k Amiga - With Pressure Sensitivity

[Wylennah]

The title says it all. I've been on kind of a longggg quest. Run TVPaint on An Amiga 4000 with pressure sensitivity.

Does anyone have a big box Amiga with a working tablet in TVPaint running?
Like anyone... in the WORLD?

[Sloppytoons]

That's so obscure in 2019. As far as I know TVPaint is only Windows, Mac and Android (Linux maybe?). So If you are going to use it you might need to emulate it somehow to work on the Amiga OS, or reverse engineer and port it yourself, and let the team know you did this.

I don't know enough about the history of TVpaint, but they used to be called something else many moons ago, and maybe in that incarnation it was running on Amiga?

As for pressure sensitive stylus, you would need drivers for anything modern to run, and I don't think anyone has written Amiga drivers for a Wacom stylus yet.

Good luck though! I would love to see people running TVpaint on some of the most obscure stuff ever.

I tried animating with TVpaint on my Samsung Note 8. But the screen honestly is too small for anything as intensive. So I plugged my note into my Cintiq, and that worked, and that's as adventurous as I got.

[Thierry]

Oof.
I think that the last TVPaint version that was working on Amiga was 3.59 or 3.6, which came out in 1995.

As Sloppytoons said:

As for pressure sensitive stylus, you would need drivers for anything modern to run, and I don't think anyone has written Amiga drivers for a Wacom stylus yet.

I wouldn't have much hope to find that nowadays.

(Linux maybe?)

Yup, we are also on Linux

[Paul Fierlinger]

The Amiga used this heavy, white, pebbly surfaced tablet that was quite difficult to create real drawings with. Is this your goal to achieve? I don't want to totally knock it because that was my stepping stone from paper to digital drawing but why go retro? I just now remembered how that tablet was so difficult to draw on that it ripped my rotator cuff which required an operation. Still can see the scar from the cut like a wound from some ancient battle, which it actually was.

[ematecki]

I have an Amiga 4000 at home, with a Wacom UD0806 (I think, the one that's about half a sheet of paper) with a serial port... (no USB)
(and even a Video Toaster, alas without the hard drives...)

This version of the tablet has a thick clear sheet of plastic that's quite smooth, and you can lift it up to put a drawing underneath !
[this one (sorry I didn't find rapidly a 'non-commercial' link) : https://www.ebay.com/c/1100265970]

I'm still missing the hardest part to find.... a supported graphic card !
Because TVPaint doesn't work on the Amiga built-in graphic "card"...

Everything was working when I put it in storage some 10 years ago... I wonder if it still works...

[mox]

I had been using a Wacom Ultrapad (size A5) on Amiga 1200 for years before I switch to PC, but never tried TVPaint on it...
Serial port and power supply of course.

[ematecki]

TVPaint didn't work on the 1200 (or 500).

TVPaint needs an Amiga 2000/3000/4000 with an additional graphic card.

[CartoonMonkey]

There's an accelerator coming out called the Vampire 1200 that will change all of that. '

The Vampire is already out for Amiga 600, 500, 1000, 2000 ... and it gives the true color output that TVPaint Amiga needs.
In fact the vampire accelerator makes the amiga 500, 600 the fastest Amiga alive, including boosting it's color output to AGA.

https://www.vesalia.de/e_vampire1200.htm
@ematecki If you ever want to give your Amiga 4000 a good home, let me know!

[Paul Fierlinger]

Is this Vampire made specifically with the Amiga in mind? I'm actually surprised no one has restarted its production yet; I understand there are many Amiga users around. It actually was made just a few miles from where I live.

[mox]

From https://apollo-accelerators.com

Apollo Accelerators is an Amiga Classic accelerator board product line. It uses the Apollo core which is a code compatible Motorola M68K processor but is 3 to 4 time faster than the fastest 68060 at time. It also brings Amiga Classic near to Amiga NG by bringing digital video with millions of colours.

Quite impressive! More than an upgrade, that card makes a "new " computer

[CartoonMonkey]

It was an incredible machine at the time. I did six films for Sesame Street on the Amiga.

The Vampire accelerator is both a stand alone unit (a new Amiga compatible with far more power than any existing Amiga from the past for 2019) as well as an accelerator for the older machines. But there is no serious animation software for it that compares to TVPaint on PC/Amiga/Linux. It's really sort of a thing for hobbyists at this point. But it's interesting to see how far they've taken it. My father's generation has train sets, I have vintage computers.

[ematecki]

I hope I won't disappoint anybody, but the last TVPaint version on Amiga didn't have any animation feature...

[daninski]

Your website says there was animation on the Amiga version, or do you specifically mean the very last version?

"1992: TVPaint 1.4

In 1992, Herve Adam released an upgrade to TVPaint 1.0 based on the TVPaint Technology 1.4: TVPaint 1.4.

The main improvement of this version is the integration of a scripting language ARexx, for automating repetitive tasks and creating animation."

[ematecki]

Animation layers "as we know them" appeared in TVPaint 4.0, the last Amiga version was 3.59.
There *may* have been some tools to facilitate animation (just like PS somehow claims to do animation...), but you had no timeline for sure...

[daninski]

Ah ha, I see. I never saw TVPaint on my amiga. I was using Deluxe Paint back in the day.

I've animated in Photoshop before, it's not great and it makes you realised exactly why TVPaint is so good

https://vimeo.com/15187586 <- this was done in photoshop.