LightWave goes high-res and 24-bit!

After about 30 years of silence on the Amiga platform, killer-app "LightWave 3D" of "Babylon 5" and "seaQuest DSV" TV-series fame (and many more) has received an update. 

"Update" being a little bit of an understatement - it seems to be more like reverse-engineering and a rewrite. Original LightWave company NewTek stopped supporting the Amiga around 1995 (rumor has it that after the last public Amiga version 5.0, version 5.5 was developed, but never released), so it never got to see the shift to "retargetable graphics" aka RTG, let alone proper Full-HD screen resolutions as provided by modern FPGA-based Amiga systems. So despite outstanding functionality, speed and output quality, LightWave remained somewhat tied to the Amiga's built-in graphics chipset, which became a bit of a flaw over the last three decades.

Thanks to the effort of a team of Amiga and LightWave enthusiasts, this has now changed drastically. A couple of weeks ago, news popped up of a new release called LightWaveRTG, with an(other) update (1.1) following shortly after (Sept. 12th). It is more or less a re-implementation (in parts) of LightWave 5.0r and Modeler 5.0f, but with many limitations removed, and some modern features added. 

The biggest change may be that the GUI is now RTG, freed from Amiga-chipset screenmodes - now you can model and layout in 1920x1080 pixels, if you like. What a relief! Also, 24-bit color has been added to many previews, so you now get much more accurate feedback about what the final rendering will look like. Here are some more features of LightWaveRTG: 

- loading and saving of anim previews
- many bug fixes, improving program stability
- Datatypes support (includes PowerPC Datatypes)
- rendering speed improved by up to 20%
- run multiple instances of LightWaveRTG at the same time
- new icons
- ...and more

It's an amazing update that massively improves usability on more recent Amiga configurations. There appear to be no plans to further expand LightWaveRTG - but there is also talk of a LightWave (classic and RTG) add-on named "JumpGate3D" that is currently under development, said to be "the next step" for LightWave Amiga. That sure sounds exciting.

Check out the sources below for all the details:

It seems the news of the release showed up first on Amigatronics website (Spanish). 

https://amigatronics.com/2026/08/29/lightwavertg-el-iconico-lightwave-nativo-rtg-gracias-a-tolkien-y-kikems-amigawave/ 

Especially the English Amiga Board link is recommended, with English translation of the news, download link (updated for version 1.1) and some early user feedback.

https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=123609 

LightWave Digital, the company holding the rights to the current official LightWave line of products (Windows and MacOS), has a very nice history page.

https://lightwave3d.com/documentation/lightwave-history/

Wikipedia has a lot of information about LightWave.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LightWave_3D 

And this is a YouTube video of LightWave user "Muadib 3D" checking out the new release (2026-09-14):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLtRhfPid6o

 

Muadib 3D 

 

Alien Breed Tower Assault - in 4K!

Retro Recipes was able to remaster some old Alien Breed Tower Assault (1994) footage.

"Alien Breed: Tower Assault" is the last of Team17's top-view 4-way-scrolling Alien Breed games, before they went on to continue the series in first-person 3D-view. It is a little more refined than the previous games in the franchise, which includes having fancy 3D rendered intro and cut scenes like it had just become mandatory for all those fancy PC games of the 1990s. 

This video by Retro Recipes popped up just yesterday, in which the intro sequence of Tower Assault can be seen in stunning 4K quality. It's 90s' 3D, so the higher resolution doesn't necessarily match the quality of the modeling and textures, but nonetheless this is quite nice to see. But, most importantly, this isn't a conversion, remake, AI-upscaling or anything - it's the actual LightWave 3D project files, found on Team17's actual development machine (an A4000), just re-rendered in 4K.

It's always great to see the original developer's work preserved, and re-examined decades later. On top of the nostalgia, oftentimes interesting details, or forgotten features can be found. Program source code can be adapted to modern systems, or emulators can be used, but in this case, part of "Alien Breed: Tower Assault" just got better with time, (apparently) without any modifications.  

Anyway - see for yourself: 

 

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/eIMDD25gnjI

Retro Recipes x Commodore

 

Amiga in the movies: Fatal Frames (1996) - A3000T, CineMorph, ImageFX

The rarest, and one of the best Amiga models built, along with some Amiga image processing, can be seen in Italian thriller "Fatal Frames" ("Fotogrammi Mortali", 1996).

In this late giallo one of the characters reviews some video footage using an actual Amiga 3000T. It's not the most exciting movie ever, but this might be the only time this rare Amiga model has been put on film.

Can you already see it?

It's not perfectly clear what precisely is happening technically, the editing suite that can be seen in "Fatal Frames" has more pro-gear, genlocking might be involved, the footage on the screens might be edited for the movie, etc. But at least some of it is obviously genuine Amiga.

This keyboard...

...looks familiar, ...

...as does this GUI popping up from the bottom of the screen.

After watching a couple of scenes on the video screens there's confirmation: An Amiga 3000T can be seen briefly, standing on the right side of the editing desk.

There it is! An Amiga 3000T standing on the right side of the desk.

Then we get a little montage of actual Amiga action! CineMorph, with a file requester looking for files in "Work:ImageFX/pics", confirms the GUI we saw popping up before: It's Nova Design's ImageFX, probably version 2.0 or 2.1.

An Amiga 3000T and a "Deep ILBM" image loading progress-bar in a movie - epic stuff for the nostalgic and enthusiast! Actually it's a little surprising that this professional editing suite doesn't have a DraCo, which came out just two or three years before the movie and would've been the logical upgrade. But then, maybe it was a tad too expensive, or they used Amiga only for additional image processing and genlocking, or maybe it just wasn't available yet at the time of filming - and, of course, an A3000T isn't shabby at all.

* * *

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_Frames

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116284/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBmTxYEIWDI
("Fatal Frames" full movie, Amiga scene at 1:42:58)

 

P-Vision PCMCIA graphics card

In case you've missed it: A new graphics card for the PCMCIA slot is soon to be released.

The original information seems to date back to the Amiga 40 event in Germany, and was amplified by Amiga Bill when he put it on his YouTube channel in Oct. 2025, but some updates have been coming in over the past few weeks.

The upcoming "P-Vision" graphics card, set for release on May 16th 2026 at the Amiga Ruhrpott Convention #4 (ARC) in Duisburg, Germany, is developed by Oliver Achten, who also created the AmiGUS Zorro slot sound card.

P-Vision PCMCIA graphics card logo

Some information has been published on various websites (see links below), and in an interview in "WhatIFF?" magazine Issue 5.19 (April 2026) (see links below), Oliver gives a couple more details about the design. The P-Vision is a PCMCIA device, thus it works with an Amiga 600 or 1200. A 68020 CPU and some FastMEM is required, though. It's a RTG graphics card with HDMI output, providing up to FullHD graphics resolution in 32-bit, equipped with a 64-bit blitter capable of ~320M pixels/s. The driver for P96 (Picasso96) RTG system is developed by Thomas Richter. ("...smooth, buttery screen dragging..." - O. Achten, "WhatIFF?")

Some of the specifications seem to be preliminary, full details are planned to be revealed at ARC #4. (Based on the information currently available it's not entirely clear what sort of sound support the device might have.)

It will be distributed by Alinea Computer (amiga-shop.net), but it's an open-hardware project aiming for affordability and simplicity of design, which means you can also build one yourself. The information required to do so is planned to be released after some months of commercial sales. The cost of building one is estimated at around 100 EUR.

Great stuff! The PCMCIA slot is the best i/o port the Amiga ever had, and it needs more love than just a CompactFlash card adapter. P-Vision certainly makes great use of the PCMCIA slot, and is an outstanding addition to the sadly very short list of Amiga PCMCIA devices.

As a sidenote: In the "WhatIFF?" interview, Oliver also reveals that he is working on "AmiGUS mini" soundcard for PCMCIA, and "Demon 1260" 68060 accelerator for Amiga 1200, among some other things.

*

Sources:

https://amitopia.com/new-pcmcia-rtg-card-for-amiga-600-and-amiga-1200-p-vision/

https://aminet.net/package/mags/misc/WhatIFF5.19 (Issue 5.19 April 2026, "Talking Amiga", "Oliver Achten - P-Vision" interview) (.lha archive, AmigaGuide format)

https://www.whatiff.info (links to WWW-browser-readable issues)

https://www.a1k.org/forum/index.php?threads/87722 (A1k.org login required) 

https://www.amigafrance.com/forums/topic/p-vision/

https://www.generationamiga.com/2026/03/31/p-vision-gfx-an-upcoming-pcmcia-graphics-card-upgrade-for-the-amiga-600-and-amiga-1200/ 

https://en.amigatronics.com/2025/10/25/proxima-tarjeta-grafica-pcmcia-p-vision/

https://www.exxosforum.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8037 

 

AADevLog #7 - Creating "the demo"

Writing a demo is a lot of fun, because there are basically no limitations. You just use what you have, and there's no fixed goal. You can make it as short or as long as you like, and when something doesn't work, you either change it, or just drop it. 

While all along the way, of course, you run into a lot of issues. A proper demo generates graphics and sound, and has some sort of timing. That's a little less work than a game, which additionally needs user interaction (input) and "rules of engagement", but it's still quite a lot to handle. 

It's interesting: creating graphics and sound with some math is great, but at a certain level it's all about timing. Assembler coding gurus doing elaborate sprite multiplexing and stuff know much more about this - but even a simple piece of software like "the demo", written in C, involves dozens of little timing considerations. How long does it take to load something from disk, how long does it take to make the calculations, what needs to happen concurrently, does something have a proper effect at the given speed, etc. - and what's the runtime of the complete end result on different machines? In the end, to simplify things a bit, I decided that "the demo" is tailored to a 7Mhz OCS Amiga without FastMEM. It runs fine on faster Amigas, but you lose the nice realtime-drawing Lissajous curves, they just pop up, and the music cuts off at the end.

A tile-effect in "the demo"

Fixed-point math was used for the Lissajous curves and the 3D graphics. It not fully optimized, e.g. uses multiplications where maybe a bit-shift would've been possible, but it's still waaaay faster than software floating-point calculations. 

Sine and cosine functions were replaced by a CORDIC algorithm, adapted from the Python code found on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CORDIC.

The Lissajous curves code is an adaptation of the code found at BIT-101's old blog: https://bit-101.com/2017/2022/11/coding-curves-04-lissajous-curves/

The mandelbrot set code is also an adaptation of the code found on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plotting_algorithms_for_the_Mandelbrot_set

"The demo" uses medplayer.library for music playback. I was surprised by hearing the floppy drive load the graphics from floppy disk, while the music kept playing. Wasn't there a thing with PAULA and the disk drive? Or is it in medplayer.library? Anyway, very nice, no need to handle music pauses when loading new data.

Overall, the amount of tech that went into "the demo" was a little bigger than expected: It also has graphics double-buffering, multitasking, IFF ILBM loading, and an interrupt server.

You can download "the demo" from AmiNet, and run it on your own Amiga, if you like:

https://aminet.net/package/demo/disk/amigaalive

A bash script to run different configurations of fs-uae

Chances are you want to change your Amiga emulator's configuration quite often, for example for developing and testing purposes. A script that runs the emulator can help you to do so without effort.

There are thousands of ways to somehow simplify Amiga emulator usage. If you're a GUI & mouse user some of the work has already been done, but for the CLI user there might be some annoying typing involved.

Below is an example Linux bash script that selects fs-uae emulator configurations and sets options based on a single short command line argument. It doesn't do very much, but it saves some typing, especially because fs-uae has a somewhat clumsy way of handling floppy disk images, aka ADFs.

Linux bash script to run fs-uae with different setups

The idea is this:

- You run the script without additional command line arguments, it runs your emulator with your preferred default configuration.

- You run the script with a given keyword (e.g. "4000", see script below), it runs your emulator with another configuration.

- You run the script with a path to an ADF, it additionally inserts that ADF in drive 1 (without booting from it).

- You run the script with the keyword "adf" (see script below), and a path to an ADF, it runs your emulator with a basic Amiga 500 configuration, and inserts that ADF in drive 0 to boot from.

There's of course room for improvement here, for example there's no proper error checking for the "adf" setup (ADF path?) in this script, and sometimes it might be nice to reuse some configuration with another fs-uae command line parameter than the floppy configuration, e.g. input device selection.

#!/bin/bash

UAEBIN=fs-uae

# no trailing slash here:
CONFDIR=/home/data/uae/configurations
# default configuration:
UAECONFIG=$CONFDIR/A4000-040-fast.fs-uae

OPTS=
ADF="$1"
DRIVE=1

if [ "x$1x" == "x4000x" ] ; then
    UAECONFIG=$CONFDIR/A4000-040.fs-uae
    ADF="$2"
fi
if [ "x$1x" == "x600x" ] ; then
    UAECONFIG=$CONFDIR/a600.fs-uae
    ADF="$2"
fi
if [ "x$1x" == "x500x" ] ; then
    UAECONFIG=$CONFDIR/a500-wb13.fs-uae
    ADF="$2"
fi
if [ "x$1x" == "xadfx" ] ; then
    UAECONFIG=$CONFDIR/a500-adf.fs-uae
    ADF="$2"
    DRIVE=0
fi

if [ "x${ADF}x" != "xx" ] ; then
    OPTS="--floppy_image_0=$ADF --floppy_drive_$DRIVE=$ADF $OPTS"
fi


CMD="$UAEBIN $UAECONFIG $OPTS"

echo "running fs-uae:"
echo " $CMD"
echo
$CMD

* * *

DISCLAIMER: No responsibility is taken. Use at your own risk.

I Love The `80s - Men Without Hats like the Amiga 500

Walkman, arcade, Live Aid: Pop band "Men Without Hats" of "Safety Dance" fame released an ode to the `80s a couple of months ago, that features an Amiga 500.

Ok, admittedly, the Amiga really plays only a minor role here. But it's always fun to see one out there in the wild, and in this particular context, it's evidence how much of a cultural icon an Amiga computer is. Who would've thought that 40 years after release it shows up in a YouTube video that got 1.5 million views in its first nine months?

It happens at 1 minute and 53 seconds into the song. "Sounds like 1986!" - the editing is probably no coincidence.

Congratulations to the Men Without Hats for their success, and kudos to the video director for using the A500 literally at the right time. And it's a really nice tune they created here, good job!

I think we agree: We love the `80s.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV6SF492hNU