>>41431314
hehe u sound a lot like me
idk that much abt these retro systems either sadly Dx
the most retro-computing-y thing i've done was back when i was a teen, i fixed up (read: fuck around with until it miraculously started working again) this old computer that was my dad's and had just been sitting in storage/the garage for like decades lol
it's called an osborne 1, the first successful mass-market portable computer
it ran CP/M and had like zero graphics capabilities to speak of but I once copied a dice simulation program from an old book of BASIC programs
i think the floppy drives in it are finally totally kaput tho cuz i can't get it to load into CP/M anymore :<
and yea doing 3d on systems that were never rly meant to do it is so cool to me, most of these retro computer demos use a technique called signed distance fields (SDFs) to render 3d objects by sampling a mathematical formula representing the object at each pixel to figure out whether the object is occupying that pixel or not, i've long thought about trying to write an SDF renderer myself
it's also the secret to how they're able to not only render 3D objects but do crazy stuff like make them bend and twist and melt and stuff like that, when u have a mathematical formula for the object all of a sudden u can do all those crazy effects by just composing it with other formulas, no hardware accelerated geometry computations required!