Death Rally Amiga port

[BSzili]

Most people probably know Remedy for Max Payne, Alan Wake or Control, but before those games they made a nice top-down 3D racer called Death Rally.
There is mixed information regarding the minimum requirements depending on the release, ranging from a 486 + 8MB RAM to a Pentium 90 + 16 MB RAM.
Either way, this puts the requirements for the port somewhere between a 68040 and a 68060. Yes, with an FPU, the game makes extensive use of it.
The Amiga port is based on dRally, which was reverse-engineered from the original DOS executable.
Once finished I'll publish the changes in my fork, but it's in a good enough state for some public testing.

Requirements:
- 68040 or 68060 with an FPU
- Kickstart 3.0
- AGA chipset or RTG
- 8 MB Fast RAM
- 45 MB disk space
- AHI 4.18+

The limitations:
- no music (for now)
- no multiplayer
- fixed gamepad layout

Installation:
Copy the *.BPA and *.HAF files next to the game executable. The save games (*.SG?) from the original game are also compatible, you can continue where you left off.
The game is freeware, you can get it from abandonware sites or Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3..._Rally_Classic

By default the game will try to use RTG screen modes or what the OS says is the best native mode.
To force it to use a specific native monitor you can use this tooltype:
- FORCEMODE: filters the available modes via the mode name. possible values:
PAL, NTSC, DBLPAL, DBLNTSC, EURO36, EURO72, SUPER72, MULTISCAN

Performance considerations:
To speed up menu animations in native AGA modes, you can install BlazeWCP:
http://aminet.net/package/util/boot/Blazewcp
You can toggle the in-game FPS counter with the Delete key.

Gamepad / joystick mapping:

- D-pad  / directions - movement
- Red    / button 1   - fire, Enter, Yes
- Blue   / button 2   - turbo, Escape, No
- Yellow / button 3   - mine

For modifying regular joysticks for 3-button support, see this wiki page:
http://wiki.icomp.de/wiki/DE-9_Joyst...n_modification

Amiga executables:
http://bszili.morphos.me/stuff/drally.040
http://bszili.morphos.me/stuff/drally.060
http://bszili.morphos.me/stuff/drally.info

[alexh]

Thanks for all the hard work.

[acidbottle]

Thats really neat, will check it out later. Many thanks

edit: Just fired it up. Amazing stuff here. Rus with no issue on my piamiga, have no fpu on main 1200. Absolutely flies at pace on the 040 version, is great fun to play!

[jurassicman]

This is one of my dreams that comes true... I'll certainly check this out as soon as possible. Thanks so much in advance!

[gimbal]

I love games like (the original) Death Rally. Racing, death and destruction and pickups. Take Death Rally and add things from Supercars 2 to it like jumps, turbo boosts, trains and opening/closing gates and you have one amazing game.

[fgh]

Awesome! I played Death Rally a lot back then, single and multiplayer, and even finished the ipad version. (that they sadly didn’t update for later iOS versions)

Can’t wait to give it a try when I get back home!

[PortuguesePilot]

It was one of my favourites back in the day. I always thought that it was technically (properly) unreplicable on the Amiga. Thanks for proving me wrong after all these years.

Pity about the music, though, it was one of the things I enjoyed about it...

[DanyPPC]

Great !

[BSzili]

I'll figure something out about the music, as I really like Purple Motion, but there was no quick solution. The original S3M player is broken, and there are not enough cycles to run it in the background anyway. I thought about rendering them into samples and streaming them from memory. The main issue is that each track can contain multiple subsongs, and the game has hardcoded order/row offsets in many places, in addition to saving restoring the original position. It's just a pain to retrofit everything to a non-tracker format.

[AmyMor]

The work you do for AMIGA is incredible!
Thank you!
Can't wait to test it on my V1200!

[Don_Adan]

Originally Posted by BSzili

I'll figure something out about the music, as I really like Purple Motion, but there was no quick solution. The original S3M player is broken, and there are not enough cycles to run it in the background anyway. I thought about rendering them into samples and streaming them from memory. The main issue is that each track can contain multiple subsongs, and the game has hardcoded order/row offsets in many places, in addition to saving restoring the original position. It's just a pain to retrofit everything to a non-tracker format.

What do You think about using this PS3M replay routine? It works even for 68000.

http://aminet.net/package/mus/play/ps3msrc

[StevenJGore]

Just tried it, it's a seriously slick port!

Runs very smoothly on my A1200 with Vampire V2 V1200 in RTG mode. I used the 060 version.

Do you plan to add the ability to select an RTG screenmode?

-EDIT- Something I just noticed when playing it again, this time with a controller. I have to unplug the controller when in the game menus otherwise it randomly moves the selection and selects things. In game, it works fine.

[nikosidis]

This is very nice. Great game.

Thanks BSzili

[Locutus]

Took a peek at the original DRally code, man i don't envy you Great work!

[Seiya]

i tried on winuae, but it run in a stamp size

[PortuguesePilot]

Originally Posted by BSzili

(...) I thought about rendering them into samples and streaming them from memory. The main issue is that each track can contain multiple subsongs, and the game has hardcoded order/row offsets in many places, in addition to saving restoring the original position. It's just a pain to retrofit everything to a non-tracker format.

I thought about the sampling solution, but I was completely unaware of the inherent complications to Death Rally's music. Alas, if it has to be rendered without music, so be it. I just think that the music was a very important part of the game, to a point where my brain went to a certain driving pattern whenever I heard/saw a certain track/song combination.


Sparked by this thread, I revisited Death Rally yesterday after about two years without playing it. It's incredible how immediately playable it still is, even after all these years.

Even though I don't have an Amiga that will be able to run it, I commend your efforts and to see that a 040 can run it is mind blowing, but above all the fact that it can be made to run in AGA is what astounds me the most. It just exemplifies the fact that AGA wasn't such the lacklustre chipset we often slag it to be.


Major kudos, BSzili!

[Lord Aga]

Wow, awesome!
Death Rally is a magnificent game. It is great that we finally have it on the Amiga. Thanks BSzili!

It's out of my Amiga's specs, but it's nice to know that it is in our game library

[Seiya]

there is some command line to increase to fullscreen?

[Aladin]

@Seiya

Try in AGA

Tooltype:
FORCEMODE=PAL

[Seiya]

drally.040 and drally.060 haven't icon. I make a script to launch trying to add that tooltype, but doesn't work.

edit:
i resolved, because i used RTG setup. Now game run in a AGA setup and it is ok