Whats the story behind the 3-D graphics system you wrote in 1981?
I wrote a vector graphics library for the Apple II and first used it to make a few games. In those days, I didn’t design a game so much as see an arcade game and clone it. I wasn’t that interested in playing or designing games. My real love was in writing fast graphics code. It occurred to me that creating tools for others to make games was a way for me to indulge my interest in programming without having to make games. What Apple II graphics routines were your favorites? The one I remember was a hack to draw proportional font text really fast. This used special tables and depended on the font having no characters with width greater than 5 pixels, just enough to do a decent “m” or “w.” This code was used in “MousePaint,” the “MacPaint” clone for the Apple II mouse. How did you get your 3-D code running at an acceptable rate? The key routine was the line drawing. I wrote code that broke down the problem into the nearly horizontal, mostly horizontal, mostly vertical, and nearly vertical
