Back in college, for a final project, I did a simple line rendered, 3d-ish demo in MIPS assembly using the MARS (MIPS Assembler and Runtime Simulator).
It runs a little bit better in the simulator.
I've always liked assembly, so I'm going to port the code into a real mode x86 version, borrowing from FloppyBird and MikeOS where needed (might need to check the license on the latter...).