(Autodesk) Animator

In short: The Animator application formerly published as Autodesk Animator from 1989-1994 was released with a BSD license by its developer Jim Kent in 2011. It can be downloaded from GitHub. The binary version was removed from the Releases page a few years ago, but it is still possible to find a download in the Git history.

I barely remember Animator from way back. Someone I knew had a copy. Not likely a very legal copy. I remember playing with it a bit back then, but then much more in the 10 or so years since I saw the new free release. Not that I am an artist of any kind. Animator has many fun features and is also limited in interesting ways. There are no layers. There is only a single undo step. But that is not as terrible as it sounds. There are all sorts of clever, but non-obvious, tools built-in that you can use to do things that you would otherwise do with layers or multiple undoes. It takes some planning and practice. It feels almost like a puzzle or game.

You could write an entire book about all the tricks you need to know to get anything done with that application. So the first thing I did was to buy one. $1+shipping for Inside Autodesk Animator from some used bookstore on Amazon. Not that it is not also easy to find scanned books about Animator online, but what fun is that? It really takes a lot of planning to do things. Animate simple shapes, one at a time usually, and go back to fill in details. Save small parts and shapes and masks to files and load later. This probably works better in 2025 than in 1989, as saving and loading files happen in an instant now, and disks have virtually unlimited capacity when each file is only a few kB .

Maybe no sane person would use this instead of Krita or GIMP or Aseprite (or Blender 3D), but it DOES have some cool features. Almost anything you do can be applied to multiple frames of an animation, in ways that often make a lot of sense (but may be non-obvious at first). Everything just fits well together. It is not the huge pile of everything that you get in most applications. And you also get the Optics features and the Polygon Tween tool to morph one shape to another.

I somewhat lost interest in Animator after a while, since compiling it was non-trivial and also required some non-free (read: illegally downloaded commercial) software like Turbo C and Pharlap. Having an open source release of an old application is much more fun if the source code can actually be used for something! Luckily now I think I found a solution to this, hinted at in my previous post here:

Combine the BSD-licensed release of Animator from 2011 with the MIT-licensed release of MS-DOS from 2024 and compiling Animator is now pretty easy. Spent maybe an hour figuring out how to write a Makefile and Link-instructions, and it seems to mostly work. There are some bugs. Better avoid the Optics for now, and there are probably a few other serious bugs as well. Data can be lost. The old downloads are safer for now, but I hope that it is possible to make a stable version using the Microsoft toolchain from their MS-DOS repository.

Best thing of course about a DOS graphics application is that it runs everywhere. I use Animator mostly in DOSBox-X (in FreeBSD), but it works great also in FreeDOS (in QEMU or running on the bare metal) and on my phone in DOSBox Magic. It runs everywhere and for as long as there is an emulator able to run DOS (or an emulator that can run a system that can run a DOS emulator) it will be possible to keep using the exact same version of Animator. No forced upgrades, nothing that ever becomes deprecated. It also works exactly the same everywhere. Running it on a Mac will be exactly the same as running it in Windows or on an Android tablet. Learn how to do something and you never have to unlearn.

Looking forward to someone figuring out how to build the Pro version. It supposedly supports 24-bit colors (instead of 18-bit) and SVGA resolutions (instead of only 320x200). It also has support for some C-like scripting language for writing extensions. Overall that seems like an actually, for real, useful free graphics application. But I am having fun enough with the more limited original version for now and I want to try to solve those remaining bugs and maybe add a few minor things first.

tags: #dos #animator