Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D

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.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 Hardware
Chapter 3 Team
Chapter 4 Software
Chapter 5 Sequels
Chapter 6 Ports
Chapter 7 Epilogue

Appendix A Before Wolfenstein 3D
Appendix B Xms Vs Ems
Appendix C The 640Kb Barrier
Appendix E Good Stuff
Appendix F Release Notes By John Carmack
Appendix G 20Th Anniversary Commentary