Going way back I used to love Dpaint on the Atari ST and the later on the Amiga, I'd heard that there was a similar modern day package for PC but I'd never really looked at it properly. Well now I have, it's excellent and I've bought it.
Not only is it brilliant for pixel art and animation it also has this amazingly useful feature (as a free downloadable plug-in) that looks perfect for making maps in GE and taking a hell of a lot of work out of it. Not only does it create a tile set from your map image for you, but it also outputs map data in the form of an 'anim index'!! Check out...
http://www.cosmigo.com/promotion/index. ... p+Exporter