Hardware Heritage
The wireframe 3D cube is the "Hello World" of computer graphics. Before the era of dedicated GPUs, every vertex rotation, perspective projection, and line segment was a hard-fought battle of CPU cycles and optimized integer math.
PC Integer Math
PC programmers relied on pure integer math to rotate and project 3D points. Without an FPU, sine and cosine were looked up from tables, and projection required carefully managed fixed-point shifts.
Amiga Blitter Lines
The Amiga's Blitter had a hardware Line Mode. This allowed the machine to draw wireframe edges significantly faster than the PC's CPU, making complex vectors a hallmark of the Amiga scene.
Perspective
Converting 3D (X,Y,Z) to 2D (X,Y) via division by Z is the foundation of all computer graphics. It taught coders about the inverse relationship between distance and size.
3D Cube
Fundamental 3D geometry rendering.
Legacy ASM (Amiga)
; Blitter Line Draw setup move.w #$8000,BLTCON0 ; Line mode move.w d0,BLTBMOD ; d0 = line slope move.l a0,BLTCPTH ; a0 = screen ptr
Modern GLSL
mat4 mvp = projection * view * model; gl_Position = mvp * vec4(position, 1.0);