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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 15, 2025 · 18 upvotes (top 33%) · 0 views

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

Category and tags

  • Horizontal
  • Dev tools
  • B2C
  • Not AI
  • Hobby / open-source project

Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗

Could you build this?

Partial While basic canvas drawing tools are easily vibe-coded, achieving a pixel-perfect recreation of Bill Atkinson's original MacPaint algorithms and QuickDraw patterns requires specialized retrocomputing reverse engineering.

What it would actually take: The frontend is built with HTML5 Canvas and JavaScript/TypeScript simulating a 1-bit monochrome display with precise dithering patterns and aspect ratio scaling. The challenge lies in porting or accurately emulating original 68k QuickDraw rasterization routines, specific line drawing, flood fill, and lasso math without modern anti-aliasing. A builder needs deep knowledge of retro graphics algorithms and access to original Mac System software reference implementations.

Discussion

6 comments analyzed.

Competitors mentioned: NextGen Tools

Feature requests: blog post about the project

Competitors

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

Attention rank: #273 of 732 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).

Launched 17 days after the earliest competitor.

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