Computer graphics has a very interesting history, and like many things, there's a lot to learn from studying it. Surprisingly, many techniques and principles are still relevant to this day.
Thankfully, the Internet is full of documentation, post-mortem accounts and reference implementations to learn more about all this.
Here's a bunch of random noteworthy things and references I forgot to link (sorry for potentially digging rabbit holes):
The best information tends to come from official documentation detailing almost everything you want to know about the inner workings of systems. Additionally, unofficial community documentation can also be of great quality and complement official sources.
The architecture overview posts from Rodrigo Copetti (https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/) pack a lot of accurate information at a glance, and are a great starting point if a specific topic piques your interest.
Emulators' progress reports can reveal a lot about the details and intricacies required for accurately replicating these systems' features: https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/ is one such amazing source of information, but all other major emulation efforts have equally interesting content.
Transparency sorting of surfaces (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order-independent_transparency) is a hard problem to solve for traditional scanline renderers (most PC/console GPUs), to the point that even today's releases can ship with somewhat obvious rendering errors.
On the other hand, tiled renderers (used in the Dreamcast, mobile hardware, and Apple silicon) are able to solve this problem due to their very nature, albeit trading another set of drawbacks, though the completely different hardware approach is a nice read (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiled_rendering).
Someone once shared a video demonstrating a 3D package from ancient Lisp machines (https://youtu.be/gV5obrYaogU?t=30), and it was almost shocking to see how many things were familiar and done right from a modern perspective.
Reimplementing new techniques on old hardware. For example, someone implemented real-time shadows and toon shading on N64 (https://youtu.be/VqDAxcWnq3g).
For fun, you can grab RenderDoc (https://renderdoc.org/) and copies of your favourite games to analyse their frames (even via emulation): see how developers implement or fake visual effects and generally how these games render their world.
For instance, Dolphin emulates the GameCube's semi-programmable texture environment unit (TEV) via a pixel shader, and its shader source code is directly visible and editable, with the resulting output shown in the texture viewer. With the aid of textures, you can implement refraction, reflection and heat haze, among other effects.
Thanks for the massive reply. Lots of cool stuff, and a few I didn't know about!
* I use RenderDoc a lot both for fun and at work.
* I've read the Dolphin blog every now and then.
* I love Rodrigo Copetti's website and remember reading everything it had about Nintendo consoles when I first found the site.
* I'm intimately familiar with OIT and used the AMD slides about OIT with linked lists as inspiration for the particle simulation I wrote as my Master's thesis.
* I'm familiar with tiled rendering and have worked with hardware which uses it
All the other stuff you shared is new to me and I will definitely be digging into it!
The write up of the RE2 MPEG decoding was thrilling (even though I'd seen MVGs coverage before).
But the H264 decoding is just surreal. Imagine if someone whipped that out in 1996.
Is this what they mean when they say sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic? :)
I know most of this stuff anecdotally but I didn't start working with 3D until programmable shaders were already becoming commonplace.