What is LaserPaint?

Take this with a grain of salt as it's based on memories from 35+ years ago...

Upon its release, LaserPaint was touted as the next generation of painting and graphics tool. While MacPaint was limited to 72 dpi output, MacDraw with its vector-based tools could take full advantage of the LaserWriter's 300dpi resolution. LaserPaint was designed not only to combine MacDraw's vector-based tools with MacPaint's bit mapping, but it improved upon it by allowing bitmap editing up to 600dpi.

 

Laserware also touted their "revolutionary" virtual joystick. You can see it in the bottom right of some of the screenshots. The user would "grab" that joystick with the mouse cursor and be able to move around the image quickly and precisely using that control stick. (In reality, I found it to be merely "ok" to use. Later advancements in UI proved to be far superior. But it definitely did work without too steep of a learning curve.)

 

I personally put together many documents and brochures using LaserPaint, and the application did what it was supposed to do. However, working at 300-600dpi with a 9 inch screen at its native 72dpi was about as taxing as it probably sounds like.

 

Also, if memory serves, I think we (well, my boss) paid $495 - MSRP - for the application in 1987.

Download LaserPaint for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

System Requirements

From Mac OS 1.0 up to Mac OS 5.0

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Mini vMac