Comment by zeta0134

3 months ago

Rebecca was well known in emulation circles for her high quality work on various games of the era, often pushing the hardware in unusual ways. This article is one of my favorites, detailing the wacky tricks she used to get Another World's 3D rendering system running acceptably on a Super Nintendo

https://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_SNES/

Rest in piece, you absolute legend.

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zeta0134

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rob74  3 months ago

She also somehow pulled off the port of Doom to the hopelessly underpowered hardware of the 3DO in just a few weeks, after others had tried and failed for much longer than that. The final release had a reduced viewport and a bad framerate, but the background music was great (recorded with a band and stored as audio tracks on the game CD).

https://github.com/Olde-Skuul/doom3do

Also, 62 years is much too young! And one month from diagnosis (because of being short of breath) to dying is really rough - although there's a lot of progress on cancer treatment, some forms have symptoms at such a late stage that they're unfortunately still a death sentence...

netcoyote  3 months ago

Hey, I got to see this code!

Back when Blizzard was still Silicon & Synapse, we got Rebecca's source code to Another World SNES from Interplay to use for a game we would develop, and they would publish, and I was the engine programmer.

I remember reading the source code, which was ... sparsely documented, and wondering what was going on. Like "you're writing to the DMA registers?!?"

The code was amazing, because it has has to draw polygons into 8x8 pixels cells that are stored in planar format at 60FPS. On a 3.5 Mhz processor. Blew my mind.

Incidentally, the game was called "Nightmare", and later became "Blackthorne", which was released for SNES, Genesis, and PC.