Warp3D was a project founded by

Haage & Partner Haage & Partner is a German company established in 1995. The company distributes software products where they usually are the exclusive distributor. Products are aimed at Microsoft Windows and Mac OS, and has been aimed at AmigaOS in the past. Th ...

in 1998 that aimed to provide a standard API that would enable programmers to access, and therefore use, 3D hardware on the

Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers produced by Commodore International, Commodore from 1985 until the company's bankruptcy in 1994, with production by others afterward. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16-b ...

. Its design was similar to that of both the Picasso96

graphics card A graphics card (also called a video card, display card, graphics accelerator, graphics adapter, VGA card/VGA, video adapter, display adapter, or colloquially GPU) is a computer expansion card that generates a feed of graphics output to a displa ...

drivers and operated in a similar fashion to the

3dfx 3dfx Interactive, Inc. was an American computer hardware company headquartered in San Jose, California, founded in 1994, that specialized in the manufacturing of 3D graphics processing units, and later, video cards. It was a pioneer in the f ...

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. It was hoped that the creation of this

API An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build ...

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. Hyperion Entertainment developers created

OpenGL OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) is a Language-independent specification, cross-language, cross-platform application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D computer graphics, 2D and 3D computer graphics, 3D vector graphics. The API is typic ...

subset called MiniGL sitting on top of Warp3D to ease porting of games such as

Heretic II ''Heretic II'' is a dark fantasy action-adventure game developed by Raven Software and published by Activision in November 1998 continuing the story of Corvus, the main character from its predecessor, ''Heretic''. It is the fourth game in the '' ...

. At time of its release, Warp3D provided significant speed increase over software rendering. Years later however, newer 3D APIs (e.g. TinyGL in MorphOS) offered better performance on the same hardware. In 2014, it was announced that Warp3D was now jointly owned by British company A-EON Technology Ltd. On April 1, 2015, A-EON Technology subsequently released Warp3D for RadeonHD (Southern Islands chipset). In March 2016, A-EON Technology Ltd announced that they had developed the new Warp3D Nova featuring support for

Shaders In computer graphics, a shader is a computer program that calculates the appropriate levels of light, darkness, and color during the rendering of a 3D scene—a process known as '' shading''. Shaders have evolved to perform a variety of sp ...

. Warp3D Nova was originally mentioned as planned complete rewrite and Shader-centric design in the AmigaOS 4.0 Feature List more than decade earlier. Development of the new release intentionally took some inspiration from this original Warp3D Nova plan. The pre-release version 1.15 was published on 1 May 2016 in the Enhancer Software package for

AmigaOS 4 AmigaOS 4 (abbreviated as OS4 or AOS4) is a line of Amiga operating systems which runs on PowerPC microprocessors. It is mainly based on AmigaOS 3.1 source code developed by Commodore International, Commodore, and partially on version 3.9 develop ...

. 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 OpenGL for Embedded Systems (OpenGL ES or GLES) is a subset of the OpenGL computer graphics rendering application programming interface (API) for rendering 2D and 3D computer graphics such as those used by video games, typically hardware-accelerate ...

2 implementation on top of Warp3D Nova. The first public version 1.4 was released on 31 August 2016 as part of the Enhancer Software package version 1.1.

Running Requirements

Warp3D requires the following in order to work properly * An

AmigaOS AmigaOS is a family of proprietary native operating systems of the Amiga and AmigaOne personal computers. It was developed first by Commodore International and introduced with the launch of the first Amiga, the Amiga 1000, in 1985. Early versions ...

compatible system with CyberGraphX or Picasso96, containing: ** At least a

68040 The Motorola 68040 ("''sixty-eight-oh-forty''") is a 32-bit microprocessor in the Motorola 68000 series, released in 1990. It is the successor to the 68030 and is followed by the 68060, skipping the 68050. In keeping with general Motorola ...

processor with FPU for AmigaOS versions predating 4.0 ** A PowerPC CPU for AmigaOS 4.0+ ** Optionally

PowerPC PowerPC (with the backronym Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC – Performance Computing, sometimes abbreviated as PPC) is a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) created by the 1991 Apple Inc., App ...

supported on

WarpOS WarpOS is a multitasking kernel for the PowerPC (PPC) architecture central processing unit (CPU) developed by Haage & Partner for the Amiga computer platform in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It runs on PowerUP accelerator boards developed b ...

** Any of these graphics cards: *** CyberVision 3D *** CyberVision PPC *** BlizzardVision PPC *** Any

3Dfx 3dfx Interactive, Inc. was an American computer hardware company headquartered in San Jose, California, founded in 1994, that specialized in the manufacturing of 3D graphics processing units, and later, video cards. It was a pioneer in the f ...

Voodoo card *** ATI Radeon R100, R200 *** ATI RadeonHD

Southern Islands The Southern Islands is a planning area consisting of a collection of islets located within the Central Region of Singapore, once home to the native Malay islanders and indigenous Orang Laut sea nomad tribes before they were relocated to the ma ...

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.

Other implementations

Alain Thellier created open source clone called ''Wazp3D''.

MorphOS MorphOS is an AmigaOS-like operating system designed for Power and PowerPC based computers. The core, based on the Quark microkernel, is proprietary, although several libraries and other parts are open source, such as the Ambient desktop. The p ...

included a Warp3D implementation known as ''Goa3D Graphics Library'' developed by Nicolas Sallin.

Running Requirements

Other implementations

References

Further reading