Although the article itself is quite old by now, I find the techniques rather interesting. My own modern games still work on Windows 98 (not 95, sorry) with DirectX 7 level hardware and sometimes it can be challenging to accomplish a cool effect that would be trivial in a vertex and/or pixel shader.

Though to be honest, I'm starting to worry a little about support for the fixed function pipeline being deprecated/removed in drivers or at the API middleware level. I would assume that, in modern versions of the APIs, they end up emulating the FF pipeline using shaders.

Driller has always fascinated me, even though I never could make much progress in the game, yet always found something new when I explored. I've even documented Freescape in great detail and did a reimplementation of the engine. Abandoned that effort when the ScummVM devs included a Freescape implementation.

Cool article. I do take issue with one thing though. The author thinking that it was common to use Windows 95 in 640x480 16-colour VGA. I don't think I've ever seen anybody do that except just after installation whilst they were scrambling to install proper SVGA drivers. Even Windows 3.1 I used in 800x600 16-bit (64K colours), well before Windows 95 came out. But I'm pretty sure that at least 256 colour mode was available to virtually anybody whose hardware was capable of running Windows 95.