irooster VS ancient-3d-for-turboc

I just published the source code for the first app I ever built, all the way back in 2003: https://github.com/aaronbrethorst/irooster

It "turns your Mac into a $2,000 alarm clock."

I originally made it because I had endless amounts of trouble waking up for my morning classes in college, and found that the only alarm that could get me up was a subwoofer right underneath my bed. So I hooked a 2.1 speaker system up to my Mac, wrote a little app to start playing an iTunes playlist at a particular time, and ended up productizing it.

It was never a huge commercial success; I think the best I ever did with it was about $2,000 in sales one month after Apple featured it in a newsletter (different times!), but it taught me several important lessons about building a commercial software product that still guide me today.

Enjoy checking out my super janky code!

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.