KoalaPainter
More info
- Creator
- Koala Technologies
- Type
- Paint program
- Platform
- Commodore 64, Atari 8-bit
The C64 paint program whose save format, KOALA, became the scene's de facto standard for multicolor pictures.
KoalaPainter was sold in the early 1980s by Koala Technologies alongside the KoalaPad — a graphics tablet you drew on instead of wrestling a joystick. The program worked in the C64's multicolor mode, and its plain bitmap format (the .koa extension) happened to spread so widely that it outlived the software itself.
Long after the tablet was forgotten, modern converters still read and write KOALA files, and scene artists saved their pictures in the format for decades. A clean case of the interface dying while the file format lives on.