Acid Warp
- Initial Release Date
- October 12, 1992 (v3.22)
- Color Palette
- 8/18b
- Max Resolution
- 320x200 (up to 2048x2048 in ports)
- License Status
- Open Source
- Codebase
- C++
- Platform(s)
- MS-DOS, Linux, Windows, Amiga
- Authors
- Noah Spurrier and Mark Bilk
Description
Acid Warp periodically generates over 40 different patterns by plotting 2D mathematical formulas, and animates them via palette rotation. Acid Warp was written for MS-DOS in Microsoft C++ 7.0 by Noah Spurrier and Mark Bilk using Turbo C.
Acid Warp's source-code is available. One of the interesting bits from it is the image of Noah Spurrier's face used in the opening. It is encoded pixel by pixel into the source, rather than being loaded from a data file. The text can be seen under "Noah Spurrier ASCII" in the Documentation section below.
One other interesting detail from the source regards Acid Warp's maximum resolution. Though the original program only supported standard 256 color VGA resolutions (i.e. 320x200), Noah did prepare the lookup tables used for pattern generation to support displays up to 2048x2048. At the time he seemed to think displays of such high resolution would never come about.
...they can be easily expanded to handle larger screens as video display technoledgy advances. (uh huh)
...though I guess it did take nearly 20 years for them to do so.
Ports
- 1996: Ported to Linux by Steven Wills with added support for high resolution output (up to 1024x768).
- 2005: Ported to Windows in Python by Noah Spurrier.
- 2008: Ported to Windows by Boris Gjenero, supporting arbitrary high resolutions.
- 2010: Ported to Amiga.
Video
Screenshots
Downloads
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Acidwarp (Windows DOSBox edition):
The MS-DOS version compatible with Windows via DOSBox. Note that DOSBox doesn't support Ctrl-Break, normally used to exit. The program can be exited with the DOSBox exit shortcut, Ctrl-F9, or the standard Windows close button in windowed mode.
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Acidwarp (MS-DOS v4.2) (v4.06) (v3.22):
MS-DOS Acidwarp
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Acidwarpy (Windows v1a):
Alpha version of Acid Warp for Windows. It only runs in low resolutions (i.e. 320x200) though.
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Acidwarpy (Windows Python):
Basic Windows Acid Warp in Python. It only runs in low resolutions (i.e. 320x200) though.
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Acid Warp (Linux v1.0):
Linux Acid Warp, supporting high resolutions.
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Acid Warp (Windows SDL v4.2.3 Prerelease3):
Windows Acid Warp, based on the Linux/X Windows versions and also supporting high resolutions. Use the included registry entry to fix the palette when in fullscreen mode.
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Acid Warp (Amiga v1.0-1):
Amiga Acid Warp.