3 ms·
But that's what you have to do on limited hardware. Raycasting is awesome, but it's a hacked, inverse raytracing limited to a single ray plane. What made the b
by deaddodo 9y ago
But that's what you have to do on limited hardware. Raycasting is awesome, but it's a hacked, inverse raytracing limited to a single ray plane.
What made the bouncing ball awesome was the fact that it could be done thanks to the planar video setup and powerful blitter compared to the chunked video system IBM-compatible's were using up through SVGA.
- bitwize 9y agoMost of the PC's graphical memory layouts in the 80s and early 90s were planar; the major exceptions were CGA and 320x200 MCGA 256-color. That had a lot to do with why PC gaming was so bad; without a blitter, graphics had to be drawn on-screen by shifting the bit patterns "by hand" and drawing them on the appropriate bitplanes. Many games got around this by only drawing sprites or scenery elements on 8-pixel boundaries. John Carmack figured out a way to use the EGA's scrolling registers and off-screen video memory to create smoothly scrolling backgrounds; for sprites he stored four copies of each sprite, each shifted to a different bit position so they could easily be drawn on screen. Chunky graphics is what saved the PC, gaming-wise, and made Doom and Quake possible. Drawing an image became a matter of writing the color-table index for each pixel to that pixel's memory location. Screens of considerable complexity could be drawn with the CPU alone.