ancient-3d-for-turboc VS Pico-setup

Nice! This prompted me to post my own code from the same era: https://github.com/pjc50/ancient-3d-for-turboc

I guess I should add screenshots.

Twenty-five years ago, slightly before I was an undergraduate, I got hold of the PC Games Programmers Encyclopedia http://bespin.org/~qz/pc-gpe/ and built myself a software renderer. You can see it on github: https://github.com/pjc50/ancient-3d-for-turboc

Software matrix multiplication is a perfectly reasonable way of doing 3D graphics, when you don't have a GPU. They were just starting to become a consumer product at that time: https://fabiensanglard.net/3dfx_sst1/

The set of things you had to worry about is just .. different. My ancient programmer credentials from 1996: https://github.com/pjc50/ancient-3d-for-turboc

Back in the day, you had:

- single processor

Is this where I post the code I wrote twenty-five years ago to do 16-bit fixed-point 3D rendering? https://github.com/pjc50/ancient-3d-for-turboc

The target architecture was a 33MHz 486 PC running in "real" (ie sixteen-bit) mode. While hardware floating point was sometimes available (DX systems) it was quite slow.

As a mostly (ancient!) hobbyist programmer - so take my views as a bit grumpy - we seem to have developed such complex toolchains and frameworks, that the industry suffers from 'goldfish bowl' syndrome in that the IDEs and tools have grown in complexity and size to fit the complexity we've created (that's a bit recursive!).

I know it's a crude comparison, but consider the likes of installing Turbo Pascal and a few libraries ('units') from back in the day with what I had to go through to setup the vscode-based toolchain on Linux for the Raspberry Pi Pico, which required me to fudge a script: https://github.com/linker3000/Pico-setup/blob/main/pico_setu..., and I almost gave up trying to follow various instructions to get an IDE running under WSL due to various quirks and changes which made the online instructions out of date or missing key tweaks.

I even approach platformio with a degree of trepidation for fear that a bucket-load of stuff will need to be updated before the odd bit of code I've hacked together will compile this time round.

Perhaps if you've grown up during the mainstream days of Eclipse, Platformio etc., their appearance and behaviour are just second nature and I'm just looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses! Oh well, back to configure and make - I can handle that!