I came across this page a long time ago Steve A Baker And he mentions how one of the images on an earlier video game he created was done using a simple adder and math.

How do you do this kind of thing? It would be really cool to create images mathematically.
I have wondered (and googled) but only found descriptions about fractals. But I don’t think this is a fractal. Thanks.
Procedural image generation is well known in the demoscene community. You can refer to some of the open source demos for a variety of techniques.