I think it's time for me to submit my unplayable entry.
It has no gameplay, just a concept. Sorry about that, I just wanted to support this little compo even if this is more a demo than a game.
Coded in C++ with OpenWatcom on a 486 but later switched to Pentium laptop to improve compiling time. Although now it's alread not perfectly fast on a Pentium, so my initial plan to optimize for 486 failed. Haven't even tried it there..
p.s. Needs mouse and good cycles (above 32000) in Dosbox or a good Pentium :P Might improve speed later..
Really impressive. I wouldn't know where to start with something like this, especially with how smooth it seemed to run! It's a bit of a shame you didn't get a chance to finish it and make it more game-like. Do you plan on expanding on it in the future?
I also recognize the pattern on the ground -- I created nearly the exact same one in a small project ages ago: http://i.imgur.com/UfNUIne.png
Unfortunately I found out that my DOS computer doesn't work anymore and like others DosBox crashed pretty quickly. I'm still impressed by anyone making a 3D engine in DOS.
Strange that dosbox crashes. It may be that I have different configuration where this doesn't happen. I could try different variations of the conf file to see if I can catch the bug. I had some stability problems sometimes on the real PC too (rare crash when I sometimes run it).
After a bit more testing on the real machine. I think I can detect small hiccups every a few seconds, and the interval seems similar to the time it took dosbox to crash. In the real DOS machine, it continues working indefinitely, but these hiccups might be something wrong in the code that triggers dosbox to crash.
A bit late to reply here. The hiccups are because I used a vsync and incremented movements (instead of timer). I know I could have done it with timer, but being tight in time, I had a crash trying it, so I left it then. I have other problems, some of the inline assembly crashes (so I have not used it), so some other of them might do something wrong I am not aware. I must find what it is in the near future, don't want to make a game or demo and have it randomly crashing.
Btw my dosbox crashes after a few seconds, but I tried it on my DOS machine and it works just fine :)
This would be a nice arcade game if it was finished. Brings to mind a mixture of iridion2 and skyroads ( http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/skyroads ).