Raycasting 3D demo disk

[David Schmenk <dschmenk@YUCH.gmail.com>]

Here for your enjoyment is a technology preview/demonstration of a 
raycasting and rendering algorithm I have developed as part of my Apple 
II 30th birthday-retro-game-just-because-I-can thing.  Reminiscent of 
Wolfenstein 3D, it runs on a standard 1 MHz 48K Apple II+ (or II w/ 
Applesoft in RAM/ROM) or greater.  Only a joystick is required.  It is 
possible to run it on an emulator, but I highly recommend using real 
hardware with a color monitor.  Accelerators make it run too fast, so 
disable them if you want the controls to be sane.  I present it as a 
140K DOS 3.3 disk image compressed with gzip.  Download with this URL:

http://schmenk.is-a-geek.com/tarfiles/raydemo.dsk.gz

I hope it doesn't end up being a bad idea placing a direct link, but its 
only 11K in size.

Just a little background - I have a pile of algorithms I've been 
creating in my notebook for some time.  Some people like Soduku for 
their diversion, I like 6502 assembly language.  The 30th anniversary of 
the Apple II seemed like a good time to put some of them together.  Its 
always fun to make old (obsolete) hardware do things people don't 
expect.  In this case, a full screen 3D walkthrough.  However, don't 
think I've made an Apple II perform like NVIDIA's latest GPU.  In order 
to get interactive framerates and decent colors, the lo-res graphics 
mode is employed.  I am not double buffering the rendering - you see it 
as it renders.  Textures are only 16x16, and there are only 15 of them. 
 It would have seemed pretty cool back in 1977 though.

Download it, give it a try, let me know what you think.  I hope to have 
an actual game to play with a geekly humorous story-line in a few months 
based on this technology.

Dave...