rust_dos VS Animator-Pro

You do not need segment registers much if you stick to the tiny model. Here is someone compiling Rust to a 16-bit DOS COM executable:

https://github.com/o8vm/rust_dos

Not sure what the approach would be for them to expand that to support segments.

In DJGPP there are macros to allow your protected mode application access physical real-mode addresses (like when you want to write to video RAM). I don't know if IA-16 also does something like that, or if they added far/near keywords to the language like old 16-bit C compilers did (at least the ones I used).

Free Pascal has helper-functions to work with segment+offset pointer pairs, also without having to modify the language itself. I think that would work well enough in C, but I guess the old method of adding non-standard keywords was seen as slightly more convenient.

Demo: https://github.com/o8vm/rust_dos

It is probably possible for almost any old platform with some cross-compilation magic, but not anything that will be officially supported as the compiler-makers focus on modern systems. There is for instance an unofficial 16-bit DOS backend for GCC and at least one or two projects to compile Rust to DOS-executables (that I assume use Clang?) (in addition to 32-bit DJGPP(gcc) for MSDOS that I linked to above). Probably are similar projects to target 68k somewhere?

I like to start up Dosbox-X or one of the virtual Amiga environments that comes bundled with Amiga forever. Definitely cozy.

More often I use some old application, like the nowadays BSD-licensed ex-Autodesk Animator. It is fun to figure it out and more fun than modern applications in many ways. I even bought an old used book about it and read cover to cover. Limited compared to modern graphics software, but "cozy" is a great way to describe the experience.

https://github.com/AnimatorPro/Animator-Pro

But I think very limited and objectively worse GUIs can be fun for inspiration and to get other styles. I love to play around with Autodesk Animator. The workflow is kind of awkward but being forced to always think ahead of what you want to do and compose images of small parts (because there are no layers and many other limitations) it becomes more like a fun puzzle/game to get anything done (and the resulting FLI files can be imported into Aseprite for more serious editing!).

Other tools may be a bit more lacking. Not sure if any reasonably modern version control system works. Graphics editors will be a bit old (but Autodesk Animator was released open source and is quite great really and no idea how fun sfx editors and other gamedev tools from last century are to use today.

Autodesk Animator can save and load PIC files. But it looks like your header is different from what I see in one of those I happened to have.

Was it https://github.com/AnimatorPro/Animator-Pro ?

I took the time a few years ago to learn a bit about how to use Autodesk Animator (it was released with a BSD license some ~10 years ago and can be downloaded legally for free these days). Was really impressed with the GUI. Just press a single key to open the menu that begins with that letter, then the first letter of the menu-item you want to use. They managed to use only words that begin with unique letters while still making a lot of sense. Plus some other single-key shortcuts. And many, to me, unusual design choices everywhere, but it all makes sense and is consistent in a way that after a few hours I was not bothered at all by the fact that nothing was like a modern GUI, and there was definitely nothing about using more modern GUI conventions I can think of that would make it more pleasant to work with.

https://github.com/AnimatorPro/Animator-Pro

Wild guess is that a GIF without a color table would typically render using the default VGA palette back in the day? I tried to open it in dosbox in PictView but it displayed that GIF in grayscale (not all black at least!) (that application is from 2015 though and might not be representative for how real 1989-era applications would have done?). Then I tried the "crop" tool that comes with Autodesk Animator, because I know the application itself only supports GIF87a in 320x200, but crop also said the image had unknown version.