Name: Game Engine Black Book
Rating: 5 (4 reviews)
ISBN: 9781987418439

Fabien Sanglard

Doom

Game Engine Black Book

Game Engine Black Book, Wolfenstein 3D

Bouke van der Bijl

Very understandable deep dive into various sections of the Wolfenstein engine. The author is very good at visually explaining the hardware situation developers in the late 80s/early 90s had to deal with, and what kind of crazy tricks they had to invent to get the game up to a decent frame rate. My favorite technique was (mis)using the VGA bank mask to be able to write multiple pixels at the same time, halving the amount of memory writes a typical scene needed to do. I went through it in a couple hours. 

I’d recommend getting the PDF for free from 
http://fabiensanglard.net/gebb/index.... and then donating to the author.

Hardik Prajapati

How was Wolfenstein 3D made and what were the secrets of its speed? How did id Software manage to turn a machine designed to display static images for word processing and spreadsheet applications into the best gaming platform in the world, capable of running games at seventy frames per seconds? If you have ever asked yourself these questions, Game Engine Black Book is for you. This is an engineering book. You will not find much prose in here (the author’s English is broken anyway.) Instead, this book has only bit of text and plenty of drawings attempting to describe in great detail the Wolfenstein 3D game engine and its hardware, the IBM PC with an Intel 386 CPU and a VGA graphic card. Game Engine Black Book details techniques such as raycasting, compiled scalers, deferred rendition, VGA Mode-Y, linear feedback shift register, fixed point arithmetic, pulse width modulation, runtime generated code, self-modifying code, and many others tricks. Open up to discover the architecture of the software which pioneered the First Person Shooter genre.

Game Engine Black Book Doom

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