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 

 

P96 V3.3.1 is out!

Jens Schönfeld / individual Computers is showing his commitment to Amiga RTG software by releasing another update of P96 graphics card driver.

Here's a copy of the v3.3.1 list of changes:

• The Cirrus5434.chip driver was broken (Piccollo64, Matze's graphics card) and did not switch back from direct color modes to chunky modes.
• One release of UAE had an issue by indicating that it would support mode mixing, but forgot to provide the necessary call-backs in some configurations. P96 provides now default call-backs avoiding the crash.
• Bitmap handling was simplified and streamlined.
• The Visiona driver supports now panning and interlace.
• The installer places now the P96 version into ENVARC:Picasso96/Version so you know what you have on the system.
• The installer no longer provides wrong default selections for the available boards in case the list of installed boards requires more than one page.
• The installer makes a very tiny consistency check on the unpacked files as some people unpacked on the PC, and then protection bits were incorrect.

Also the installer for Buddha has been updated to v1.4. See links below for all the details.

Sources:
https://icomp.de/shop-icomp/en/33/items/new-versions-buddha-install-v1-4-and-p96-v3-3-1.html
http://amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2022-06-00031-EN.html

P96 3.2.1 is out!

Jens Schoenfeld / Individual Computers says Merry Christmas with an update to P96 (Picasso96) that happens to match AmigaOS's latest version number.

According to the announcement (see link below), it's a bugfix release that addresses many little issues that were reported by users via P96's support forum.

Among the changes are updates to blitter emulation, improved use of hardware sprites (mouse pointer) that increases performance, and added support for the ZZ9000 graphics cards' dual-palette feature, removing artifacts when dragging Intuition screens.

For more details, go to Individual Computer's website:
https://icomp.de/shop-icomp/de/newsreader/items/p96-v3-2-1-herausgegeben.html

Additional sources:
http://amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-2021-12-00087-EN.html