I wish I still had this level of motivation :)

Everyone who has had a gun pointed in their face must have been really stupid then.

Per-pixel sorting while racing the beam is tricky, game consoles usually did it by limiting the number of objects (sprites) per-line, and fetching+caching them before the line is reached.

I think a lot of linux/mac folks tend to printf debug, while windows folks tend to use a debugger, and I suspect it is a culture based choice that is justified post hoc.

However, few things have been better for my code than stepping through anything complex at least once before I move on (I used to almost exclusively use printf debugging).

I've had to do that on a embedded system that didn't support debugging. It was hell.

Easier to implement with proper fill conventions and multisampling, and much easier to parallelize in hardware and software.

* Hardware even back in the 90s used this type of approach :)

Good to see you want virtual machines to be illegal.

However, if you are hard of hearing to the point where you are actually disturbing others, I would recommend headphones.

Jittery polygons refers to the artifacts you get when polygon vertices are snapped to integer pixel coordinates, rather than taking into account subpixel positions. Quake did not have this issue, despite not using floating-point calculation in it's rasterization. It did use floating point when texturing spans, after rasterization, but this was more of an optimization than a fundamental requirement for accurate texturing :)