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ZenPaint, a pixel-perfect MacPaint recreation for the browser

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I've been recreating the original MacPaint in the browser on and off for a few years. It's still alpha quality, but I'm finally ready to share it more widely.The goal was pixel-perfect accuracy, so I spent a lot of time with Atkinson's original QuickDraw source code, emulators, and my iBook G3 to get details like font rendering and the shape tools exactly right.Some technical notes:- Font rendering was surprisingly tricky; understanding the original pipeline's quirks took lots of experimentation, and avoiding canvas smoothing/aliasing required careful handling.- Written declaratively with React; performance is kept reasonable with a buffer pool and copy-on-write semantics. - You can share links to artwork from within the UI.E.g.: https://zenpaint.org/#p=KQumBQ5x- Mobile support was not considered here (for obvious reasons). It might still be usable on a larger phone or tablet but I have not tested this at all.There's something magical about making art within MacPaint's constraints: the 1-bit graphics, the limited resolution, the peculiar set of tools that still feel surprisingly expressive.Still some rough edges and missing features, but I'd love feedback from anyone who remembers the original.

HN · launched Nov 25, 2025 · 8 upvotes (top 56%) · 0 views

Niche: digital painting and drawing software · 68 launches, 9 in the last 7 days ▲ +80% · Explore this niche →

Category and tags

  • Horizontal
  • Content generation
  • B2C
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

Partial A retro browser paint app is very easy to vibe-code, but achieving pixel-perfect fidelity to the original MacPaint requires painstaking reverse engineering of Bill Atkinson's QuickDraw source code and 1-bit raster algorithms.

What it would actually take: Building a faithful recreation requires transcribing or faithfully porting 68k Pascal/Assembly QuickDraw rasterization routines (such as Bresenham line variations, region filling, and dithering patterns) into modern Canvas or WebGL shaders. The hard part is matching the exact mathematical edge-cases and timing quirks of 1984 Mac system software. This requires specialized emulator debugging and retrocomputing reverse-engineering skills.

Discussion

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Competitors

Other products that read as similar to this one : 731 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.

Attention rank: #400 of 732 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 27 days after the earliest competitor.

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