For sure that's a big reason but it's also a useful basis for doing lighting calculations because of their sphere like nature. They are quite efficient in dynamic scenes and historically used in a lot of precalc to do something akin to real time Global Illumination

How do you design Atari 2600 clones? Do you have to replicate the TIA?

Yes, although there are a number of ways to "cheat" aside from just pulling chips...

Good point but that was only 2019... :)

Elsewhere in a comment someone posted the archive links which worked - I had fun playing in the emulator on my Windows PC

why bother?

I guess it’s mainly to sell the technology and the illusion that comes with that.

So, money, for supposed control. Which is not true of course

Back to artisan all natural intelligence coding?

The drug is the llm coding. I kind of get it, when I was a kid and first got a computer I felt the same way after I learned assembly language. The world is your oyster and you can do what felt like anything. It was why I spent almost every waking hour working on my computer. That wore off eventually but I've spent some time on my backlog of projects with Claude and it feels bit like the old days again.

And they say that Nvidia coined the phrase GPU - but I recall that Sony did it earlier... not that it really matters.

Rendition's VQuake was actually pretty good, more than barely better than software rasterization.

Edge anti-aliased polygons!

Thanks I did enjoy it! One thing is, I feel like the PS1 wobble disc protection, although bypassed with swaps and mod chips, it has never been possible (besides one historic example: Datel) for someone other than Sony to make a disc bootable on the console. I feel like most PS1's weren't modded so it was quite a well done lockout. But I understand that wasn't your main point - just that it was a surprisingly effective copy protection.