Possible Grafx2 port?

Hello, just another RPi newbie checking in. Doing a little dabbling in RISC OS and loving what I’ve seen so far, just have a suggestion I thought I’d bring up.

As I’m a bit of a digital artist I was looking into bitmap editors for the system. Photodesk looks decent, but I think it’d be useful to have some other options available for people to get started with right out the gate.

Looking into open-source options, a lot of them have dependencies that would probably make porting awkward, but a good possible candidate might be Grafx2, which already has ports for Haiku, AROS, BeOS and seemingly almost every system going except RISC OS itself. I think it’d be a good addition to the available software library and was wondering if anyone might consider having a go at porting it. I was looking into it myself, but I’m still too much of a newcomer to get my head around that just yet. It seems like it might be relatively straightforward, but that just might be my being rubbish at getting my head around that stuff.

A quick glance at the Grafx2 documentation seems to show that it is limited to 8-bit colour modes and lower. Not much use to RISC OS except possibly for pre-Iyonix machines. If it cannot handle 32-bit colour, what is the point?

It’s primarily used for pixel/game art, it’s more or less a contemporary take on the old Deluxe Paint software. I wouldn’t consider it outdated, more a useful tool for a specific task. It’s already one of the first apps available on the Pi store for their linux distros, for example, as an aid for budding game makers.

It wouldn’t be my first choice, but it’s a useful tool that could come in handy (it certainly knocks the socks off Paint) and seems to have far less required baggage than any other bitmap editor. In a perfect world I’d love to see ports of Krita, Pinta and friends, but the laundry list of dependencies probably rule them out entirely.

Maybe someone could try to motivate Denys Bogatz to release an ARMv7 compatible version of PaintCan…ISTR that this was a very capable piece of software.