Amiga 1200 meets a 65" plasma. Stunt Car Racer videos...

[Mendel]

So... having a couple of amiga 1200s in one room and a huge ass home theater setup in another... One day wife and kids went away to see grandma and I just had to do this for a while. Hauled the hardware to living room, brought a camera with me and had a bit of fun! Using the infinitiv tower a1200 for this one as Stunt Car Racer doesn´t like to accelerate with the 1260 turbocard in my desktop amiga.

So here it is: The ULTIMATE way to play Stunt Car Racer! With 65" PDP in Stereoscopic 3d!
I have to wear 3d glasses to make it actually work, I can´t really show it in the videos unfortunately. You´ll have to come over here to Finland and see it for yourself. Maybe some people who also own 3dtvs can recognize the certrain kind of blurriness though.

In each of the videos I switch to stereoscopic 3d at some point, then switch it off after some time because you can´t see stereoscopic in the video anyways and its a bit clearer that way. Though the rgb scart cable with the tv´s own special miniscart-> scart adapter still introduces some blurriness and ghosting anyways.

Horizontal lines going down in the videos are not actually visible while playing, I guess it is some kind of artifact between the camera and the tv.

1080p videos available at my youtube channel here: http://www.youtube.com/user/81Mendel

It actually works a lot better than I thought it would. It really does work! The tv makes the 2d->3d transformation and it brings a lot of depth to the image. It´s actually quite funny.

Zoom modes bring a little bit more depth still as I can zoom closer to the action. Though much of the information in the huds is lost.

First race. I´ll get better at this eventually...

 

[Arwin]

Hilarious. And my goodness, I played that game sooooooooooo much ... on the Atari ST ... which always had slightly better 3D framerates (16% higher clock) but of course in most cases much worse sound.

 

[Grall]

Omg Stunt Car Racer... Haven't even thought of that game in 15 years probably!

 

[Mendel]

on the Atari ST ... which always had slightly better 3D framerates (16% higher clock) but of course in most cases much worse sound.

Well this might just beat even the mighty ST and its superior vector graphics capabilities because there is a Blizzard 1230 turbo card with a 68030 processor running at a whopping 50MHz... and the game has a hack installed that kind of takes advantage of it... well... kind of... as it has a bit smoother framerate in places but still slows down to a crawl in many others.

for your amiga and emulation needs... here is the patch: http://www.whdload.de/games/StuntCarRacer.html
Original stunt car racer required (or if you have the new tracks (tnt) version, then this can be applied to that as well)

BTW I just realized I can make the game a lot faster still if I start it with cache icon tooltype... I guess fourth video must be done because it just got ridiculously quick... a bit harder too because it doesnt just improve framerate, it makes the whole thing run in fast forward...

 

[Tahir2]

Played it on Atari ST here too.
This was the precursor to the amazing F1GP by Geoff Crammond and I would say Stunt Race FX on the SNES + SuperFX chip was a homage to Stunt Car Racer.
Nice setup - any issues with image retention?

 

[Mendel]

Some retention issues but nothing that can´t be overcome with a couple minutes of running a bright color bar across the screen. I´ve forgotten the tv on for extended periods sometimes with still image displaying (paused a game, went to other room for reading of walkthrough, somehow got stuck in forums...) but it tends to go to auto standby mode after a couple hours of non action.

 

[Tahir2]

I'm guessing its a Panasonic?
My new LG (big mistake) totally sucks with stills and logos.

 

[Mendel]

Yea it´s the last years Panasonic VT30Y model. Just recently repaired after being 4 weeks in maintenance. It lasted 7 months before it started blinking red led of death. It had some pci board replaced on-site and now it works again since last friday.

Took bloody ages though to get a maintenance man with the right equipment to come over, after arguing that no I won´t transport the thing 100km and no I don´t have the box for it...

 

[Lightman]

Great setup!

I can't play on my 52'' Sammy LCD with Amiga because it looses sync every few seconds Stuck to 19'' TFT telly...

 

[Mendel]

back on my secondary tv... but this time with more speed due to using cache icon tooltype.

Now I only need jedi reflexes!

 

[Lightman]

Now that is properly quick!

You doing quite well for non-jedi driver .

My CD32 runs this game at more reasonable pace! And to think I first played this game on PC-286 16MHz and later on 386SX 25MHz at school!

 

[Arwin]

Yeah, that's more like it!

I was wondering what that type of game would be like now, and then I had a deja vu:

Shame I can't find a version driven in a car and with the in-car view on. If you take the highest track, it really does look (and play) like a modern Stunt Car Racer.

 

[Alexko]

I'm probably too young to be familiar with Stunt Car Racer, but the way the track is built reminds me of TrackMania. Perhaps the former inspired the latter.

 

[Mendel]

Yeah, I´m a total junkie for both the Motorstorm and Trackmania series.

I haven´t actually bought the Apocalypse version though as initially the demo seemed a bit dull. Maybe I should reconsider now that it can be bought cheap

 

[Gubbi]

... which always had slightly better 3D framerates (16% higher clock) but of course in most cases much worse sound.

No way!

Amigas stomp all over Atari STs thanks to its blitter.

Cheers

 

[Arwin]

Yeah, I´m a total junkie for both the Motorstorm and Trackmania series.

I haven´t actually bought the Apocalypse version though as initially the demo seemed a bit dull. Maybe I should reconsider now that it can be bought cheap

Definitely. You'll love it and the 1280x1080 should look sweet on that plasma. The way the tracks 'deform' ramps up and isn't always as intense for every race, but it gets ... not boring. The twister track is still one of my gaming highlights. It plays even better than it looks, with the controller rumbling when you get close to the twister ... (there's a similar cool experience on a bridge that starts to sway before its partial collapse)

City scapes aren't as beautiful as the best of Pacific Rift, but overall this game is very impressive, and great fun (whether you like the custscenes or not ).

@Gubbi: was blitting the bottleneck for 3D graphics in the original Amiga? Because I had a friend with an Amiga and every single 3D game had a better framerate on the Atari ST, so I assumed it was CPU limited. I think I even read something about that way back when I still read Ace magazine and such.

 

[Grall]

The blitter had few uses with 3D graphics; it could draw patterned lines and fill surfaces (solid colors only as I recall), but it was cumbersome at that and hardly ever used. Probably because of hardware limitations, and/or quirks.

Lines took 8 cycles*/pixel to plot; probably faster than what the 68000 could manage on its own, but I'm not sure how big the benefit would be in the end when considering lines at 320*200 pixels usually don't get that long, and you still need to calculate the positions of the endpoints on the slower-clocked CPU.

Likewise, surface fills required an enclosed area to fill into, so you'd have to draw border lines first and then fill the space between them. I'm not sure any game actually used this, or how it might have performed speed-wise compared to a pure software-driven algorithm.

More recent blitters like the one in Atari Jaguar for example was better equipped to draw 3D graphics, although the Jaguar reportedly had many quirks and shortcomings of its own that limited real-world performance, including outright hardware bugs.

*edit: pixels/pixel? lolwut...
*edit 2: 8 cycles/pixel probably refers per bitplane. Since a regular game would use 4 bitplanes minimum that would be 32 cycles per pixel minimum. Still fast maybe compared to the microcode-running 68k though, I dunno. I'm not a coder.

 

[Lightman]

Blitter was used in 3D games mainly as a helper with c2p (chunky to planar) screen conversion. Because Blitter in AGA chipset (A1200/4000) was only slightly improved compared to OCS/ECS it was slow and only used for 2x2 pixel c2p. That's why it was beneficial to do c2p on Blitter for 'naked' Amigas, but any Turbo enabled were better off with pure software c2p routines which used Fast memory to do screen conversion and I think Copper to move it to Chip.
CD32 had hardware chip responsible for c2p
I still remember how scared I was playing AlienBreed3D TKG II on my A1200 030/50MHz +MC68882/50MHz

BTW anyone remember HAM6 and HAM8 modes from Amiga? Designed for displaying static images or prerendered animations was adopted by clever codes in real time 3D engines giving 262k colors on screen with minimal artifacts .

 

[Mendel]

Oh now I´ll just have to try Alien Breed 3d 2 in stereoscopic mode

It´ll be silly. There´s an update for that that makes it even kind of playable and smooth. I´ll probably eventually make a gameplay video.

 

[I.S.T.]

Blitter was used in 3D games mainly as a helper with c2p (chunky to planar) screen conversion. Because Blitter in AGA chipset (A1200/4000) was only slightly improved compared to OCS/ECS it was slow and only used for 2x2 pixel c2p. That's why it was beneficial to do c2p on Blitter for 'naked' Amigas, but any Turbo enabled were better off with pure software c2p routines which used Fast memory to do screen conversion and I think Copper to move it to Chip.
CD32 had hardware chip responsible for c2p
I still remember how scared I was playing AlienBreed3D TKG II on my A1200 030/50MHz +MC68882/50MHz

BTW anyone remember HAM6 and HAM8 modes from Amiga? Designed for displaying static images or prerendered animations was adopted by clever codes in real time 3D engines giving 262k colors on screen with minimal artifacts .

That game looks neat... Shame the HUD takes up close to 2/3rds the screen though... Is there any way to make it run faster? That frame rate induces eye strain on me...