This is a really cool demo - amazing it works so well. It's all unminified JS which is a breath of fresh air these days.
Some commenters are asking how it gets such good performance and whether it would work on retro hardware. It seems it uses WebGL (and fails without it), so likely it depends on a 3D engine for at least some of the rendering process. Still, WebGL seems to be used for only a small part of the rendering pipeline.
If you want to play with arbitrary rotations instead of being locked to 60-degree increments, punch this into the developer console:
You just successfully disproved my earlier assumption that this used optimizations specifically for isometric views! It actually uses the WebGL for the 3D part too
(having said that, such optimizations would still have helped in the hypothetical case one might have wanted to implement this on old hardware)
Also, on a desktop you can use the browser zoom (via the menu) to get it to increase the font size. I managed to get my HD screen to show 96 x 54 characters, which comes close to the resolutions on old DOS terminals I think. Now if only it came with a CRT shader, like this one by Timothy Lottes:
Some commenters are asking how it gets such good performance and whether it would work on retro hardware. It seems it uses WebGL (and fails without it), so likely it depends on a 3D engine for at least some of the rendering process. Still, WebGL seems to be used for only a small part of the rendering pipeline.
If you want to play with arbitrary rotations instead of being locked to 60-degree increments, punch this into the developer console:
Then use [ and ] keys to rotate by 1 degree increments. (Tested to work on Firefox).