Look. I need you to understand that none of this was supposed to happen.

It started, as many of my worst decisions do, with DOSBox. I was replaying King’s Quest V (CEDRIC IS A TREASURE AND I WILL HEAR NO SLANDER) and somewhere between the desert and the witch’s forest, my brain did that thing where it goes “hey, remember other DOS programs?” and then I’m three weeks deep into building a full-blown desktop application.

The Pitch (For People Who Don’t Remember 1984)

Print Shop was THE software for making banners, greeting cards, and signs back when Reagan was president and computers were beige. Your parents probably used it to make your birthday party invitations. It had like twelve clipart images and they were all made of approximately seventeen pixels and it was glorious.

I built a new one. From scratch. In 2026. Because my brain is a chaos engine that cannot be controlled.

Pixel Pusher 3000 is a cross-platform desktop app that makes greeting cards, signs, and calendars in authentic DOS-era aesthetic. CGA 16-color palette. Pixel-perfect rendering. The whole beautiful, crunchy, nostalgic package.

The Feature List (For People Who Need Convincing)

• Greeting Card Wizard: Six-step process to create folded cards with borders, clipart, and custom messages for inside and outside
• Sign Maker: One-page printable signs for parties, warnings, passive-aggressive office communications, whatever
• Calendar Creator: Monthly calendars with decorative headers and the ability to mark special dates (like “day I finally finished this project”)
• 350+ Clipart Pieces: All generated via PixelLab in authentic 1-bit black and white style
• Export Options: PNG, native printing, or save as a .pp3k project file (yes I made a custom file format, yes it has checksums, yes that’s overkill, yes it’s very 80s)

The Clipart Situation

Okay so when you’re recreating Print Shop you need clipart. A lot of clipart. Organized into categories. Birthday stuff, thank you stuff, holiday stuff, animals, food, sports, transportation…

I generated over 350 pieces using PixelLab’s pixel art generation. Each one lovingly prompted to match that 1985 DOS Print Shop aesthetic. Black and white. Chunky pixels. Zero anti-aliasing. Beautiful.

And then, because I am who I am, I added an “unhinged” category. This includes:

• Screaming possum
• Mothman
• Concerned frog
• Feral shopping cart
• Skeleton on toilet
• Dial-up modem
• Windows error icon
• “This is fine” dog

You know. For when you need to send grandma a birthday card but you want her to worry about you a little.

The Technical Rabbit Hole

For the nerds in the audience:

• Electron + React + TypeScript because I wanted it to run on Mac, Windows, and Linux
• Sharp for image processing (Floyd-Steinberg and Bayer dithering for that authentic color reduction)
• CGA 16-color palette enforced throughout the UI
• Custom .pp3k file format with magic headers, version tracking, and integrity checksums
• Keyboard-first navigation because DOS programs respected the Tab key

The UI is lovingly crafted to feel like a DOS application got a mild Windows 3.1 facelift. Black backgrounds. Cyan accents. Yellow highlights. It looks like it should be running on a 386 and I mean that as the highest compliment.

Sarah Has Learned Things

My wife has absorbed more Print Shop trivia in the past two weeks than any human should. She now knows about border categories. She has opinions on clipart organization. She has seen me argue with myself about whether a “concerned frog” belongs in the animals category or the unhinged category.

(It’s unhinged. The frog is deeply unhinged.)

She’s been very patient. The greeting cards I can now make her are, I assume, adequate compensation.

The Distribution Dilemma

So here’s where I’m stuck: do I pay Apple their developer fee and release this properly on the App Store like a legitimate software person? Or do I just throw the installer on the internet and say “download at your own risk, I promise it’s not a virus, it just looks like it should give you a virus because that’s the aesthetic”?

There’s something philosophically appropriate about a Print Shop clone requiring you to bypass Gatekeeper warnings. “This app is from an unidentified developer” is period-accurate energy for 1984 software vibes.

But also I kind of want to see it in an actual app store. With a logo. Looking all official.

I haven’t decided yet. Maybe both. Maybe I’ll flip a coin. Maybe I’ll make a Pixel Pusher 3000 sign that says “DOWNLOAD ME” and let fate decide.

What’s Next

The app is done. Like, actually done. Cards work. Signs work. Calendars work. The clipart is extensive. The file format is robust. It exports to PNG and prints correctly.

I might add more clipart. I might add banner support (the classic Print Shop banners that spanned multiple pages). I might add more border styles. I might do literally nothing because the project is complete and I should touch grass.

But probably more clipart. The unhinged section has room to grow.

If you want to try it, watch this space. I’ll figure out the distribution thing eventually. In the meantime, I’m going to go make myself a birthday card with a screaming possum on it, because I can, because I built the software that allows me to do that, because this is the timeline we live in now.

Stay weird. Make cards. Question nothing.