Given some time between projects, I spent a month helping out another team at Top Dog. Their ongoing assignment was to port the game Final Fantasy Five from Super Nintendo to Win95. At the same time, they were translating the game from Japanese into English. I had two specific tasks while on the project.

The first was to display the world map, complete with flashing icons to represent cities, players, and other areas of interest. This was pretty straight-forward. The second task was more interesting as it called for recreating a 3D-like map for the player to fly over (there is a part in the game where the player can obtain a flying ship). The 3D effect is achieved by taking a large area of the 2 dimensional map and mathematically stretch bliting it, one scan line at a time, to achieve the illusion of curvature. Throw in a shadow, some take-off animation frames, and some extra key controls, and there you go. 

I know, this isn't real 3D programming but that's what it looked like on the Super Nintendo so that's what it was supposed to look like on the PC. In any case, the Lunar Golf project got re-signed and I moved on to that.