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It came out just as the changeover started to happen from DOS-based software 3D engines to Windows DirectX 3D engines. I worked on this game at exactly the sam

It came out just as the changeover started to happen from DOS-based software 3D engines to Windows DirectX 3D engines. I worked on this game at exactly the same time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abomination:_The_Nemesis_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abomination:_The_Nemesis_Proje... That game was supposed to be 2D, but was switched to the characters being 3D, so I brought my whole DOS software 3D engine and ported it to DirectX over the course of 2 weeks. I'm going to dig into that drawpoly.asm! There was a lot of competition in the early->mid 90s for poly blitting. I would say I had one of the very top ones. I was doing demo coding before I became a commercial video game developer. LOL.. reading DRAWPOLY now... ; Draw flat shaded poly ; IN: EDI->polygon data ; OUT: Polygon appears as if by magic in buffer The real blit code is in 3DPOLY.ASM. Doesn't look like it does perspective-correction on the texture-mapping, which isn't unusual for the time. I don't remember the PS1 well enough, did it do correction in hardware?

royjacobs 5y ago
No, it didn't. It also didn't do any subpixel correction. Instead, there was a lot of tesselation happening to try and mask the texture warping somewhat but it was never really all that successful.
- djmips 5y ago
  So it seems they took the easy road and just made a polygon renderer that was just good enough, or as good as the PS1.
  - royjacobs 5y ago
    Yes, this would have had the additional benefit that it was going to be pretty performant since having to do z-buffered perspective correct texture mapping wasn't cheap on PC's at the time and the game was already set up to not require any of that.
djmips 5y ago
Yes, I mentioned that the triangle setup appears to be in DRAWPOLY.ASM
djmips 5y ago
Yeah, I did some software poly stuff too but late eighties and it didn't have texture mapping. It was used in some sports games.

royjacobs 5y ago

No, it didn't. It also didn't do any subpixel correction. Instead, there was a lot of tesselation happening to try and mask the texture warping somewhat but it was never really all that successful.

djmips 5y ago
So it seems they took the easy road and just made a polygon renderer that was just good enough, or as good as the PS1.
- royjacobs 5y ago
  Yes, this would have had the additional benefit that it was going to be pretty performant since having to do z-buffered perspective correct texture mapping wasn't cheap on PC's at the time and the game was already set up to not require any of that.

djmips 5y ago

Yes, I mentioned that the triangle setup appears to be in DRAWPOLY.ASM

djmips 5y ago

Yeah, I did some software poly stuff too but late eighties and it didn't have texture mapping. It was used in some sports games.