Test Drive II - how do I increase the frame rate?

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Originally Posted by jotd

A good test would be to run on WinUAE with fastest possible + immediate blitter.

Tried that a long time ago, with a few other games, and I think Power Drift was the only one that worked on.

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Originally Posted by kremiso

iirc Race Drivin' was better if runned on better hardware
a lot

Hard Drivin' had a more than 100% increase in framerate on A1200 vs A500, problem is the arcade game has duff handling car as its 'star' lol

Amiga Lotus II is like the Ridge Racer of the 16bit era, nothing comes close and if you know how the handling engine works it is very controllable.

Sim type games are generally polygons and you can't really get too much out of a 68000 to do fast enough frame rates. F1GP is a good sim, GP Circuits is less simulation but it's OK too. There's probably others I can't remember off-hand.

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Originally Posted by Aardvark

We already have superior 68k version on Amiga, thanks to Jim Drew!
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PC-Task also handles the DOS version well
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Roadside graphics seem smaller on both, a bit like the SNES port. If you want that then go for the SNES version I would say as it has the Amiga quality audio too.

Atari STFM version seems better than both Mac/DOS to me. Slightly faster than Amiga version and with not quite as good but non YM based software samples based audio. Interestingly the ST version is also frame locked, it would appear running it on a 16mhz Mega STE has no improvement in frame rate looking at Youtube video.

I didn't bother to check it out on 8bit computers like the Commodore 64.

SNES version
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The ST and Amiga version compared
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[Reynolds]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

Hard Drivin' had a more than 100% increase in framerate on A1200 vs A500, problem is the arcade game has duff handling car as its 'star' lol

Amiga Lotus II is like the Ridge Racer of the 16bit era, nothing comes close and if you know how the handling engine works it is very controllable.

Sim type games are generally polygons and you can't really get too much out of a 68000 to do fast enough frame rates. F1GP is a good sim, GP Circuits is less simulation but it's OK too. There's probably others I can't remember off-hand.

For me Street Rod is the top in this genre on Amiga, in terms of playability on stronger HW. Indianapolis 500 is close but second, as I more likely the adventurous type of gameplay offered by SR.
And Test Drive is far behind as per playability compared to Street Rod, in case of driving itself. F1GP is an outstanding title, but that also "just" a run-around-on-a-closed-track stuff

[jizmo]

The SNES version seems like a whole different game with much of the geometry that made Test Drive special ripped out.

The playability on the other hand is in completely different level.

[Reynolds]

Originally Posted by jizmo

The SNES version seems like a whole different game with much of the geometry that made Test Drive special ripped out.

The playability on the other hand is in completely different level.

Yes, it's engine looks similar to Road Rash for me.

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by pipper

Maybe @paraj can pull off something like he did for TFX - assembling the whole frame in fastmem and then only copy the final frame over to chipmem. That approach can be vastly better than doing many individual blits to render a frame.

I was thinking this. There must be an entire corpus of software that has this class of bottleneck on faster machines.

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Originally Posted by Reynolds

Yes, it's engine looks similar to Road Rash for me.

First race in the video I posted for SNES looks like a 256 colour version of the Mac graphics to me. I couldn't put up with the horrible Mega Drive music but the mountain track I watched for a few seconds looked ST/Amiga-a-like.

The playability is a bit of a duffer at 4 frames per second, however if it was possible to speed up the code to 20-25 fps on faster CPUs then it might become more enjoyable like Hard Drivin' does when run on fast CPUs.

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Originally Posted by Reynolds

For me Street Rod is the top in this genre on Amiga, in terms of playability on stronger HW. Indianapolis 500 is close but second, as I more likely the adventurous type of gameplay offered by SR.
And Test Drive is far behind as per playability compared to Street Rod, in case of driving itself. F1GP is an outstanding title, but that also "just" a run-around-on-a-closed-track stuff

I loved the engine sound of Indy 500 on Amiga, reminded me of my 80s car lol. Interesting game Street Rod, never really watched a video of it.

Lombard RAC Rally running on A500mini looks very snappy, had this on my ST back in the 80s. I wonder what CPU speed that equates to on real hardware, A1200 4mb config you reckon?

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