ZenPaint, a pixel-perfect MacPaint recreation for the browser
Details
- External ID
- 46048124
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- ZenPaint, a pixel-perfect MacPaint recreation for the browser
- Website domain
- zenpaint.org
- Launched
- Nov. 25, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 8
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.4421397379912664
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
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.
Enrichment
- Theme
- niche creative and graphics software
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- Content generation
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- macpaint recreation for browser
- Manually corrected
- False
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
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 280 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #160 of 281 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 27 days after the earliest competitor.
- Compositor · github · 2026-09-16 · 3456 upvotes · similarity 0.52
- I built a browser-based 3D editor since I didn't want to learn Blender · hn · 2026-03-01 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.48
- HUD-like live annotation and sketching app for macOS · hn · 2025-10-29 · 56 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Compositor · ph · 2026-09-19 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Open-source pixel art editor with animation and auto-tiling tilesets · hn · 2026-08-07 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- ComfyUI-Krea2-Pixel-Art-Refiner · github · 2026-09-16 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- GrobPaint: Somewhere Between MS Paint and Paint.net · hn · 2026-03-14 · 54 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Pixels.style · hn · 2025-12-28 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.44
Other launches for this product
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a content generation tool for Government yet.