Mini Painter
Mini Painter is the built-in pixel art editor for creating and editing sprites, backgrounds, and tilesets. It is designed around the Mega Drive's palette and tile constraints, ensuring your artwork is always hardware-compatible.
Features
- Indexed color editing — All drawing uses palette indices (0–63), not RGB colors. This guarantees compatibility with the Mega Drive's 4 palette lines of 16 colors each.
- Drawing tools — Brush, eraser, flood fill, spray, line, arc, rectangle, circle, and gradient.
- Selection tools — Rectangular, polygon, and flood select with cut/copy/paste support.
- Layers — Multiple layers with opacity and visibility controls.
- Animation — Frame-based animation with per-frame and per-animation speed controls.
- Tile mode — View and edit individual 8x8 tiles with automatic VRAM synchronization.
- Palette editor — Edit colors, sort, spread, and import palettes from images.
- Dither support — Built-in dither patterns for drawing and gradients.
- Smudge, blur, and sharpen — Pixel manipulation tools with adjustable strength.
- Sprite sheet import — Import sprite sheets with automatic frame detection and animation grouping.
- Undo/redo — Full history support for all operations.
Palette Constraints
Mini Painter enforces the Mega Drive's palette rules:
- 4 palette lines of 16 colors each (64 colors total).
- Each 8x8 tile can only use colors from a single palette line.
- Colors are 9-bit RGB (3 bits per channel, 512 possible colors).
- The first color of each palette line is treated as the background/erase color.
For more details on palettes, see Palettes.
Keyboard Shortcuts
| Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
B | Brush tool |
E | Eraser |
G | Flood fill |
L | Line tool |
R | Rectangle tool |
O | Circle tool |
S | Selection tool |
I | Color picker |
H | Pan |
+ / - | Zoom in / out |
Ctrl+Z | Undo |
Ctrl+Y | Redo |
Ctrl+C | Copy |
Ctrl+V | Paste |
Ctrl+X | Cut |
Delete | Clear selection |