My unfounded hunch for the computing bit is that home computers became more and more commonplace in the home as we approached the 21st century.

A Commodore 64 was a cool gadget, but “the family computer” became a device that commoditized the productivity. The opportunity cost of applying a computer to try something new went to near zero.

It might have been harder for someone to improve the productivity of an old factory in Shreveport, Louisiana with a computer than it was for the upstarts at id to make Doom.

Can you elaborate on the “partially correct” bit? I’d like to understand the programming of the ROM better.

I think the source code in the GitHub repo generates the ROM in the corresponding screenshots, but it seems quite barebones.

It feels very much like it’s cobbled together from the libdragon examples directory. Or, they use hardware acceleration for the 2D sprites, but then write fixed-width text to the frambuffer with software rendering.