I know that the 8 lights restriction is a T&L restriction, and what goraud shading is.
And I know that hardware lights aren't free, but they're a hell of a lot more free than multiple render passes.
As for your assetion that it's too slow to do it manually in Blitz, that may be true for a lot of cases, but if you don't have a lot of polygons to light then I think you might be able to get away with it. My shadow system probably is probably way more costly to render than some simple vertex lights.
And I don't know why you mention goraud shading. You don't have to do any goraud shading to do vertex lights. That's all done by the hardware. You just change the vertex colors.
And I know that hardware lights aren't free, but they're a hell of a lot more free than multiple render passes.
As for your assetion that it's too slow to do it manually in Blitz, that may be true for a lot of cases, but if you don't have a lot of polygons to light then I think you might be able to get away with it. My shadow system probably is probably way more costly to render than some simple vertex lights.
And I don't know why you mention goraud shading. You don't have to do any goraud shading to do vertex lights. That's all done by the hardware. You just change the vertex colors.