Well, I only remember a little of this. Haven't got DosBox installed and I'm not in the mood to reboot to DOS right now, so I can't try this stuff and rememner what it does. I'll just toss it out here. There are comments, but it's still pretty cryptic, I'm afraid.
Int 10h is the BIOS interrupt for screen/graphics/cursor stuff. You want to use it (ah=0) to change mode. The putpixel (ah=0Ch) is slower than a gut-shot wolf bitch with nine suckling pups dragging a number nine trap uphill in a snowstorm. "sinwav1" uses it, but "ripple" uses a much faster "putpixel". As I recall, "ripple" does multiple sine waves intended to look like ripples on water. Version 2 adds a "moon" to reflect off the ripples. Based on something Ross Simpson showed me (in Pascal, originally). I don't know now how much of the code is his and how much is mine. As I recall...
Best,
Frank