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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

Video

Screenshots

Downloads

Documentation

External References

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