[quadcore]

My bro and I just bought our first PC, a cyrix 166+ and were playing doom when a friend of his shows up with a floppy and says: "my 3d engine is lagging on my PC and I dont know why, can I try on yours?".

What he showed us was the most beautiful thing I have ever see in my life at the time. My jaw felt on the ground and never my life was the same after that.

The guy's managed to software-render some sort of parabolic shape made of colored polygons in 13h 320x200 graphical mode. And it was fluid as hell. Nothing like Doom but just knowing he did that was enough for me. Later, he also made a comanche style voxel engine and something I've never seen since: real-time perspective-correct texture mapping on curved surfaces (we're talking about a program that runs at 60Hz on a 133Mhz cpu). Without internet, without books. Just looked at games. The kid was a genius and would have made a terrific career was he in the US. As would I. I study all his C and asm code and a few years later was making a software rendered quake clone. Disclaimer: I had books and Internet.