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Warp3D
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Warp3D was a project founded by Haage & Partner in 1998 that aimed to provide a standard API that would enable programmers to access, and therefore use, 3D hardware on the Amiga.[1][2]
Its design was similar to that of both the Picasso96 graphics card drivers and operated in a similar fashion to the 3dfx Glide API, which provided a uniform and standardised way for programmers to create software for the 3D graphics cards that were available at the time.[1]
It was hoped that the creation of this API would not only encourage the development and release of more 3D graphics cards, but also move away from the situation where a new piece of hardware had been developed with no software available to run on it. If the particular piece of software used the Warp3D API (enabled through a shared library), any current or newly developed hardware would be able to be used.[1][3] Hyperion Entertainment developers created OpenGL subset called MiniGL sitting on top of Warp3D to ease porting of games such as Heretic II.[4]
At time of its release, Warp3D provided significant speed increase over software rendering.[5] Years later however, newer 3D APIs (e.g. TinyGL in MorphOS) offered better performance on the same hardware.[6]
In 2014, it was announced that Warp3D was now jointly owned by British company A-EON Technology Ltd.[7] On April 1, 2015, A-EON Technology subsequently released Warp3D for RadeonHD (Southern Islands chipset).[8]
In March 2016, A-EON Technology Ltd announced that they had developed the new Warp3D Nova featuring support for Shaders.[9][10] Warp3D Nova was originally mentioned as planned complete rewrite and Shader-centric design in the AmigaOS 4.0 Feature List more than decade earlier.[11][12] Development of the new release intentionally took some inspiration from this original Warp3D Nova plan.[13] The pre-release version 1.15 was published on 1 May 2016 in the Enhancer Software package for AmigaOS 4.[14][15] Apart from its name and being related to 3D graphics, Warp3D Nova has nothing in common with the original Warp3D.
Also in March 2016 A-EON Technology Ltd announced that Daniel Müßener / GoldenCode.eu had been hired to create an OpenGL ES 2 implementation on top of Warp3D Nova.[9] The first public version 1.4 was released on 31 August 2016 as part of the Enhancer Software package version 1.1.[16]
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Running Requirements
Warp3D requires the following in order to work properly
- An AmigaOS compatible system with CyberGraphX or Picasso96, containing:
- At least a 68040 processor with FPU for AmigaOS versions predating 4.0
- A PowerPC CPU for AmigaOS 4.0+
- Optionally PowerPC supported on WarpOS[1]
- Any of these graphics cards:
- CyberVision 3D
- CyberVision PPC
- BlizzardVision PPC[17]
- Any 3Dfx Voodoo card
- ATI Radeon R100, R200
- ATI RadeonHD Southern Islands graphics cards
It also requires 3D hardware to be present, and will not run with graphics cards that are 2D only, or AGA, ECS or OCS.[18]
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Other implementations
Alain Thellier created open source clone called Wazp3D.[19] MorphOS included a Warp3D implementation known as Goa3D Graphics Library developed by Nicolas Sallin.[20]
References
Further reading
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