[HN Gopher] Show HN: Cobalt - a pixel-art painting studio for th...
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Show HN: Cobalt - a pixel-art painting studio for the Nintendo DS
Hey everyone, Cobalt is a program for painting textural and
expressive pixel-art on Windows, Linux, Nintendo DS, and in-
browser. The same 46KB core executable runs on all platforms, with
a thin emulator layer sitting on top to handle differences in
inputs and filesystem access (which makes it easy to port between
systems). It's built on Bedrock[0], an 8-bit virtual computer
system I posted about here in July. I created Cobalt because I
wanted to draw messy, gritty pixel art without smooth gradients,
and the smaller colour palette helped with making bolder colour
choices. Images can be moved back and forth between platforms, so
you can copy works-in-progress to the DS to keep working away on
the bus or train. It's like a 2004-era vision of the future.
There's a live demo on the linked page that runs in the browser,
and there are downloadable demos for every platform here[1]. Let me
know if you try it out or have any questions! [0]
https://benbridle.com/bedrock [1] https://derelict-
engineering.itch.io/cobalt
Author : benbridle
Score : 112 points
Date : 2025-09-30 20:54 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (benbridle.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (benbridle.com)
| mouse_ wrote:
| Long live resistive touch screens!
| snowram wrote:
| Little known fact, the original DS touch screen is pressure
| sensitive. I don't know of any games using this feature, but
| the Colors homebrew does use it! So the DS was a fairly
| convenient digital art machine for its time.
| HelloUsername wrote:
| Reminds me of Flipnote
| (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flipnote_Studio), where people
| created very funny things as well
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMS8-N3HCGI)
| merelysounds wrote:
| Love it; editable patterns are my favorite feature. I also like
| that in general it is a very configurable editor - being able to
| customize each tool is extremely user friendly.
| benbridle wrote:
| Thank you! The customizable tools give a surprising amount of
| power to the user for a relatively small amount of work (just a
| couple of basic editing screens). The most interesting outcome
| of all this is that the scatter and spacing parameters work
| equally well on the bucket fill tool as they do for regular
| brushes, allowing you to emulate white noise and similar when
| filling large areas.
| enricozb wrote:
| Huge fan of this sort of work, would like to put my DS to use
| someday.
| nemomarx wrote:
| Headline buried the lead that it also runs on other platforms.
| That part sounds really impressive.
| zahlman wrote:
| I love everything about this concept. Building your own stack,
| the overall aesthetic, doing simple things with modern tech to
| recapture the past... you are definitely my kind of people.
| "2004-era vision of the future" is a great slogan (although I'm
| also a fan of some c. 1984 insights).
| benbridle wrote:
| Thank you! I'm really passionate about exploring this direction
| of computing, digging around in a bargain bin of discarded
| futures to find ideas worth pursuing.
| Jotalea wrote:
| it's always awesome seeing people still making stuff for the DS.
| leakycap wrote:
| I wonder if this would be well-known if it was free instead of a
| nominal cost of $5?
|
| When I put this much work in, charging a tiny/nominal fee feels
| like a barrier without a clear reason.
|
| Younger users without payment methods and those on a budget will
| not engage with what you built.
|
| At $5, the income stream has to be miniscule, so why choose a $5
| license instead of free with donations?
|
| If you want to make money on this, all the thrilled users you
| currently have would have likely paid 2x or more the current
| price, so if making money from it is the reason for the cost, $5
| is confusing. But $5 is also confusing as a cost of entry to
| something that could be widely enjoyed at no extra cost to you,
| and might bring you something good in return if it was free and
| not paid.
|
| At $5 a pop I can't imagine you're getting much of anything,
| including attention or widespread usage.
| dolmen wrote:
| There is an online demo:
| https://benbridle.com/projects/bedrock.html#cobalt
| gyomu wrote:
| Young users without payment methods do not sideload binaries on
| a Nintendo DS.
|
| If you're hacking with a Nintendo DS in 2025 you were most
| likely a teenager in the 2000s/early 2010s, and you most
| certainly have a payment method.
|
| Agree that OP is underselling their work at $5 - the next big
| psychological barrier after $0.99 is at $9.99, might as well go
| there
| mouse_ wrote:
| $5 is value price for me. No way I'd spend 10. 5? Sure. I
| feel like I won't miss 5, but 10 is food money.
| squigz wrote:
| An old DS you find in your parents' stuff from years ago is
| exactly the sort of thing a young hacker might be messing
| about with.
| ugh123 wrote:
| Amazing! I couldn't see how to do the 'sketch layer'. Layers
| would be amazing for this
| benbridle wrote:
| The sketch layer is accessed with the 'eye' button in the
| bottom-right corner of the canvas screen. Clicking that button
| toggles visibility of the sketch layer and reveals three more
| buttons, and clicking the newly-revealed pencil button toggles
| drawing to the sketch layer instead of the canvas.
|
| The decision to implement only two layers for Cobalt was a
| conscious one. The design of Cobalt is focused towards speeding
| up the user and helping them to finish their images, and I
| found that being able to go back and tweak each layer made it
| more difficult to commit to a final image.
| ugh123 wrote:
| Makes sense. Thanks!
| dolmen wrote:
| Previous discussion about Bedrock:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44526322
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(page generated 2025-10-04 23:00 UTC)