I know that what Elite and SWA basically did was implement Rasterisation, create their format for models and a loader (I'm pretty sure that at least SWA had models built from modelers using tools, although it's not impossible to hard-code TIE-fighters it's hard to do so accurately) and many other things I may be unaware of. I know that the source code to MESA3D probably contains many of the routines that games like Elite and SWA implemented - I just want to see them in the context of a game. I don't mean Elite remakes like Oolite (which uses OpenGL and Obj-C) but projects that use similar techniques and avoid using APIs like OpenGL directly - not necessarily low-level projects, though, using 2D library like SDL (without OGL) should be enough, at least for now.

I know the best thing to do would be to disassemble the source of Elite and see how things were done by myself but before doing that I want to know more about how they were made and if there are modern open-source projects that show similar techniques. They are defined as vectors and transformed according to the position of the camera. I know Elite probably uses said scanline trickery as well (at least on some implementations like Elite NES) but I'm not sure about SWA, since it used a custom-built arcade machine either way, I'd like to know more about it. Star Fox is closer to it, since uses actual 3D models, but the implementation uses SNES' Super-FX chip and probably employs scanline trickery. Even if you could like the Build Engine that Duke Nukem 3D used, everything except the walls is just a sprite. Afterburner used rotozoom/raster effects and Wolfenstein 3D used raycasting and 2D scaling and it's not really 3D, since you can't move up.

They're actual 3D games and not faking it like After Burner.They work on an extremely low level and are written in ASM.The question is not how to implement vector graphics with modern 3D APIs like OpenGL and DirectX, since doing it is quite easy and does not require to build a vector/matrix system from scratch like those games did. I'm interesting in knowing more about how vector games like Elite and Star Wars Atari were built from grounds up.

Wireframe tank game modern