[kingcharles]

I seem to remember BRender being one of the highest-performance software renderers of the day. I used to talk to Jez on Usenet and he offered me an interview at Argonaut (I was 16 I think) after I showed him my hand-coded x86 renderer. I don't think I was doing any real mode by that time, though. I can't even remember what effect running in real mode would have outside of the memory limitations? You can still access the full 32bit registers, right? (been 25 years since I coded x86).

[samlittlewood]

There were three similarish software renderers around at that time, BRender, Canon Renderware (Adam Billyard), and Rendermorphics RealityLab (Servan Keondjian). There were also some renderers out of the demo scene that were definitely faster (but often with perf. related limitations).

The code was mostly C, with some protected mode x86 for inner loops. Prior to that point, all our PC games had been real mode x86- and BRender was a result of moving away from that.

[kingcharles]

Yeah, I was coming from the demo scene side, although my code ended up in an Eidos game.

I dug into the released BRender source until I found the inner loops, then I "Nope!"'d all the way out and remembered why I never went back to assembler.

Thanks for the memories. I'm glad the code survived all these years until it could be released.