I wrote a flame simulation in x86 assembly language. Total hoot.
I also wrote an Easter egg that shipped in a major software company’s software and is immortally burned onto thousands of DVDs slowly rotting in landfills. This one was fun and challenging because I had to mask the names of the product team from easy detection, I had to convert string text to my own custom 8x3 pixel font for rendering, I played with palette animation to create some fun raining effects, and I packed it into just a few Kb of the DOS end of a Windows executable (back in the day, 16-bit Windows apps could be linked with a custom DOS loader in case you tried to run the Windows app from the cmd line).
I loved doing some particle simulations in C++, good old mode 0x13 style. Create a gradient palette, apply simple averaging of pixels values on each frame, draw each particle with additive translucency, and you ended up with a pretty cool water-like effect.
Add some gravity and bitmapped obstacles (invisible of course to maximize the effect), and you had some real potential for nifty, if mesmerizing effects.
I wrote a flame simulation in x86 assembly language. Total hoot.
I also wrote an Easter egg that shipped in a major software company’s software and is immortally burned onto thousands of DVDs slowly rotting in landfills. This one was fun and challenging because I had to mask the names of the product team from easy detection, I had to convert string text to my own custom 8x3 pixel font for rendering, I played with palette animation to create some fun raining effects, and I packed it into just a few Kb of the DOS end of a Windows executable (back in the day, 16-bit Windows apps could be linked with a custom DOS loader in case you tried to run the Windows app from the cmd line).