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BRender Archival

BRender (Blazing Render) was Argonaut Software's real-time 3D engine, shipped through the 1990s and used in titles such as Carmageddon, FX Fighter, and Microsoft 3D Movie Maker.

This packet is the Engine Revival evidence view of the public BRender Archival v0.1.1 release. It is not a source mirror and not a claim that Engine Revival vendors the restoration. Engine Revival preserves public-safe receipts, media, and provenance. BRender Archival is the verified specific restoration.

Provenance and rights

  • Upstream source: public foone/BRender-v1.3.2, pinned at commit d88d0ed41122664b9781015b517db64353e16f19, MIT licensed. Provenance runs through Foone Turing, with the open-source release authorized by Argonaut's former CEO Jez San.
  • Specific restoration: public HarperZ9/brender-archival release v0.1.1, merge commit 11b5a8d539e911a9c07991b751402a7d51bf1bde, PR #9, candidate contents bbf3ba2f26ee9ae265759e282dc1454b2234b6be.
  • This repository vendors none of the BRender source and none of BRender's assets. Model, texture, and palette datafiles are read from the public source checkout at run time by the restoration harness and are never copied here.
  • Imported or derived BRender Archival release media, transcript, and release provenance are treated as AGPL-3.0-or-later covered third-party artifacts unless verified asset-specific evidence grants otherwise. See third-party notices.

Local and external boundary split

Engine Revival local 12-target portable materializer means the public Engine Revival scaffold that creates the portable core harness metadata. It is not the source of the 21-target receipt imported in this packet.

External pinned BRender Archival v0.1.1 21-target release means the public HarperZ9/brender-archival checkout at commit 11b5a8d539e911a9c07991b751402a7d51bf1bde. Engine Revival imports the sanitized transcript, media, manifest, and hashes from that external release boundary. This patch does not port or vendor the external implementation.

Verified release boundary

The imported 2026-08-27 native verification result is 21/21 CTest targets passing under a Visual Studio Win32 Debug boundary: 21 verified CTest rungs, all passing. The sanitized transcript is committed at attempts/transcripts/brender-v132-ctest-twentyone-targets-2026-08-27.log and starts with Test project <build>.

The target set covers:

Rung What it proves
Vector math scalar and vector core
Framework startup BrBegin / BrEnd
Wireframe BrMatrix4Perspective into a memory pixelmap
Scene graph model actors projected through BRender's v1db transforms
Solid shaded portable C scanline rasterizer, per-face lighting
Depth buffer per-pixel occlusion in the portable rung
Textured perspective-correct texture mapping in the portable rung
Datafile models BrModelLoad renders real .dat models
UV-textured models loaded model UV coordinates drive texture sampling
Multi-part assembly BrModelLoadMany composites the 12-part coupe
Gouraud shading per-vertex normals and smooth gradients
Plotter lane hidden-line-removed SVG polylines
Asset audit loaded model geometry, face indices, degenerate faces, and material attachment
Pixelmap audit BrPixelmapLoad probes period .pix and .pal files
Material audit BrMaterialLoad identifiers, flags, index_base, and colour-map attachment
Pixelmap round trip BrPixelmapSave then reload, with caller-owned workfile protection
Material resolve BrMaterialLoad material attached to loaded model faces and rendered
File-texture sampling loaded period .pix sampled with palette-aware INDEX_8 lookup
Game shell deterministic INIT/LOAD/RUN/TEARDOWN frame loop over loaded assets
Host semantic host file round trips without deleting caller-owned workfiles
Period pipeline softrend plus pentprim built from upstream, nonblack ZB sphere output

The period-pipeline media source run drives brender_core_softrend_render over dat/sph32.dat, dat/earth.pix, and dat/std.pal, emits eight nonblack frames, and records final_frame_lit=19284 valid=true.

Release media and provenance

Current public media lives under gallery/release-20260827/. It is generated from verified nonblack render output or from factual diagrams/cards that cite the same boundary. It excludes black diagnostic frames and generative imitation.

Relationship boundary

  • Retro Engine equals play.
  • Engine Revival equals preservation, research, metadata, and evidence.
  • BRender Archival equals the verified specific BRender restoration.
  • Generic Retro output is never BRender proof.

Current limitations

These are documented boundaries, not release claims:

  • Completed textured TIA output is not claimed. The experimental TIA/PIZ2TIA path executes in BRender Archival, but public release notes record black output from a measured vertex-layout/state mismatch.
  • x64 pointer-width portability is not claimed. The verified native build target is Win32.
  • Production readiness, adoption, and endorsement are not claimed.
  • Assembly-only pentprim kernels outside the exercised RGB_888 ZB and experimental TIA path remain linkage stubs.
  • The MSVC warning set is warning-only in the verified build, but has not been reduced to a zero-warning portability claim.

Reproduce the release boundary

python -m pip install -e ".[test]"
engine-revival materialize-brender-harness `
  --source-root C:\path\to\BRender-v1.3.2 `
  --output-root C:\path\to\brender-portable-core-harness
cmake -S <harness> -B <build> -A Win32 "-DBRENDER_SOURCE_DIR=C:\path\to\BRender-v1.3.2"
cmake --build <build> --config Debug
ctest --test-dir <build> -C Debug --output-on-failure

For the 21-target restoration, use the BRender Archival v0.1.1 release boundary named above:

git clone https://github.com/HarperZ9/brender-archival.git <brender-archival-v0.1.1>
git -C <brender-archival-v0.1.1> fetch --tags origin
git -C <brender-archival-v0.1.1> checkout 11b5a8d539e911a9c07991b751402a7d51bf1bde
git -C <brender-archival-v0.1.1> rev-parse HEAD

The final command must resolve to 11b5a8d539e911a9c07991b751402a7d51bf1bde. Engine Revival stores the evidence receipt, not a vendored copy of that build tree.

Records

The claims above are backed by structured records in this repository: readiness/brender-production-readiness.json, harnesses/brender-v132-portable-core-plan.json, tasks/brender-critical-edition-packet.json, attempts/brender-v132-native-ctest-twentyone-targets-win32.json, and reproductions/brender-critical-edition-source-build.json. The generated target dossier at docs/generated/targets/brender.md is the machine-updated view.