2 months ago
- Real-time 3D rendering on a 486 using VGA Mode 13h with 256 colors.
- Implemented software double buffering and dirty-rectangle copying to avoid flicker.
- Used fixed-point arithmetic for performance, with different fractional bit scales per subsystem.
- Applied per-pixel Phong lighting via a precomputed light map, similar to MatCap techniques.
- Combined texture mapping with lighting through color quantization to fit 256-color palette.
- Rasterized triangles with a DDA approach, shared across renderers.
- Added metallic rendering via reflection mapping and bump mapping with emboss-style perturbations.
- Techniques were obsoleted by GPUs and hardware advancements but led to first industry job.