Second Reality Source Code Released
Update: See the "Spin Doctor" Hard Drive Speakers play Second Reality
Twenty years after Assembly '93, Future Crew released the source code for Second Reality.
I was 16. I downloaded it from a BBS on a 14.4 modem.
I wasn't a beginner. I was writing TSRs. I wrote routines to render 3D meshes with Gouraud shading. I was doing inline assembly blocks in Turbo Pascal. I understood VGA registers. I could set up Mode 13h, chain to Mode X, write directly to 0xA000.
Then I ran SECOND.EXE.
The real-time 3D. The rotozoomer. The texture-mapped tunnel synced to the beat. The lens distortion. That transition where the music drops and everything snaps into the next effect without a single frame of hesitation.
I knew exactly enough to understand how far ahead this was. It was not just palette tricks. These guys had the entire VGA timing pipeline under control while mixing a multi-track soundtrack in software on the same CPU. Twenty-three effects in sequence with music sync and zero glitches on the same 486.
Update: Added more information and thoughts in 2020, 2024, 2025, 2026.
The Source Code
Twenty years of wondering how they did it. Now I can read it.
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