Discontinued Software

Deluxe Paint was the paint program of the Amiga era and the tool a great deal of 1980s and 1990s game art was made in. Its custom brushes, palette cycling and animation features set conventions that pixel art editors still follow, and its keyboard-driven workflow is why so many later programs feel the way they do. It is no longer sold; the versions that survive do so through archives and emulation.

A basic web-based editor made to be simple and intuitive, which can load any palette from the Lospec palette list. It is no longer in development and may contain bugs.

The simple painting program included with Windows XP. Later versions of Paint anti-alias their tools and are not suited to pixel art, so the XP version is the one artists keep around.

Particubes was a voxel editor and game platform for iPhone and iPad, later rebuilt as Cubzh. The studio behind it has since moved on to other products and the app is no longer available from its authors.

Pixly is a game-oriented pixel art and animation editor for Android, with the gestures worked out for a touchscreen: two fingers to pan and zoom, three to change the brush size. It covers layers, onion-skinned animation, symmetry, real-time tiling and cloud sync. Its own site is still up and still points at Google Play as the only way to get it, but that listing no longer resolves.