Death Rally Amiga port

[Aladin]

or launch a WB with AGA only ...

use any icons (tools). Personally, I took the Rcross icon.

[Seiya]

yes. i used a WB with AGA only.

@bszili
by the way: excellent porting

[BSzili]

Originally Posted by Don_Adan

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

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

Usually these old replayers are not suitable for a number of reasons. They are not system friendly, they use all the Paula channels, and they sacrifice compatibility for speed.

Originally Posted by 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.

Not sure what would be the benefit of a screen mode selector, as the game uses two fixed resolutions: 640x480x8 in the menus, and 320x200x8 ingame.
For the controller, I recommend testing it with JoyPortTest using lowlevel.library to see if it produces any spurious inputs:
http://aminet.net/package/driver/input/JoyPortTest
In most of the cases the controller has some compatibility issue with lowlevel.library.

Originally Posted by Locutus

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

Haha, reverse engineered code is not the easiest to read, so props to urxp for cleaning it up as much as he did.

Originally Posted by PortuguesePilot

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!

To be fair the native screen is only used as a framebuffer as it's faster to render everything in fast RAM. The game uses large sprites to create multiple parallax layers, colormap effects, shaded polygons, etc. It could be converted to planar, but once you add Fast RAM to the mix it's usually faster to blit things with the CPU.

Anyway, thanks to everyone for the kind words and the testing.

[Don_Adan]

Originally Posted by BSzili

Usually these old replayers are not suitable for a number of reasons. They are not system friendly, they use all the Paula channels, and they sacrifice compatibility for speed.

PS3M player is fully system friendly. I dont remember compatibility problems when I played S3M modules. Perhaps You can ask HippoPlayer author for help, he is mentioned in readme as author of stripped version of this replayer. From my memory this replayer was used for playing title music in Super Stardust game. Optionally (if You want better quality) You can use FastTracker 2 (68060 version) replayer from 8bitbubsy.

[koobo]

Originally Posted by Don_Adan

PS3M player is fully system friendly. I dont remember compatibility problems when I played S3M modules. Perhaps You can ask HippoPlayer author for help, he is mentioned in readme as author of stripped version of this replayer. From my memory this replayer was used for playing title music in Super Stardust game. Optionally (if You want better quality) You can use FastTracker 2 (68060 version) replayer from 8bitbubsy.

The stripped down version was (also) used in a Stellar demo to play a 6 or 8 channel module, I don't remember the demo name though.

One possible challenge for using the PS3M as is in a game setting is that it's slow to react as the audio lags behind the actual playback for the amount of data that fits in the mixing buffer. Smaller buffer will make it react faster of course.

There's also an AHI enabled PS3M available, inside HippoPlayer. AHI doesn't have this lagging problem, but may use a lot more CPU, depending on the output mode.

I could probably cook up a cleaned up S3M replayer based on PS3M and Hippo, if needed.

[BSzili]

Originally Posted by Don_Adan

PS3M player is fully system friendly. I dont remember compatibility problems when I played S3M modules. Perhaps You can ask HippoPlayer author for help, he is mentioned in readme as author of stripped version of this replayer. From my memory this replayer was used for playing title music in Super Stardust game. Optionally (if You want better quality) You can use FastTracker 2 (68060 version) replayer from 8bitbubsy.

I stand corrected! I'm still worried about PS3M using all the Paula channels, which is the problem I had with Xmplayer.library.
At the risk of sounding too fussy, xmaplay060 is probably too high quality for what I'm trying to achieve here.

Originally Posted by koobo

The stripped down version was (also) used in a Stellar demo to play a 6 or 8 channel module, I don't remember the demo name though.

One possible challenge for using the PS3M as is in a game setting is that it's slow to react as the audio lags behind the actual playback for the amount of data that fits in the mixing buffer. Smaller buffer will make it react faster of course.

There's also an AHI enabled PS3M available, inside HippoPlayer. AHI doesn't have this lagging problem, but may use a lot more CPU, depending on the output mode.

I could probably cook up a cleaned up S3M replayer based on PS3M and Hippo, if needed.

Thanks for the explanation and the offer! I see that the AHI version uses the library interface, so I could probably cut out the part I need to integrate it with the existing AHI code, and add in hooks to the game.
The best would be to strip it down even more, and make it use the game's sample library and mixer, but then I might as well spend more time on figuring out why the original player is broken...

[koobo]

From the music playback point of view PS3M only would need two channels (left + right), either Paula or AHI, so that might offer some flexibility in terms of sound effects on top of the music...

[DanyPPC]

Uploaded Glow Icons for the game:
http://eab.abime.net/zone/DeathRally_Amiga_GI.lha

[Seiya]

Originally Posted by DanyPPC

Uploaded Glow Icons for the game:

nice icon

[BSzili]

Originally Posted by koobo

From the music playback point of view PS3M only would need two channels (left + right), either Paula or AHI, so that might offer some flexibility in terms of sound effects on top of the music...

That's most welcome, as the game's own mixer needs two. Now the main question is how will the game and the player share AHI? Maybe I'm remembering wrong, but the "low level" library interface of AHI can only be used by one program at once.

Originally Posted by DanyPPC

Uploaded Glow Icons for the game:
http://eab.abime.net/zone/DeathRally_Amiga_GI.lha

As GlowIcons these look nice, but the planar images not so much. If you don't mind I'd like to include these as alternate icons.

[haymigga]

Just tried the game on my 68060 A4000D with BFG 9060 at 100mhz, and I must say I'm impressed with how nicely it plays. Quite enjoyable. Thanks for the effort - often I'm dissappointed with ports, but this one already seem quite stable and fast.

[StevenJGore]

Originally Posted by BSzili

Not sure what would be the benefit of a screen mode selector, as the game uses two fixed resolutions: 640x480x8 in the menus, and 320x200x8 ingame.

Only that I use a 32" gaming monitor so 320x200 full screen is mega chunky, so if I could select, say, 640x400, it would show it smaller and centred? I realise this is a really specific use case and not worth implementing just for this!

[Estrayk]

Tested in 680060/50 AGA and works smooth. Great work BSzili
btw, I am with the others in recommending that you try to introduce the S3M replayer.

[Nobby_UK]

At least the JoyPad is recognized
(unlike the PC version)
not that I can control it

[BSzili]

Originally Posted by haymigga

Just tried the game on my 68060 A4000D with BFG 9060 at 100mhz, and I must say I'm impressed with how nicely it plays. Quite enjoyable. Thanks for the effort - often I'm dissappointed with ports, but this one already seem quite stable and fast.

Wow, I bet it runs great on that setup! I still have plans to further improve the performance, as it's still a bit choppy at 50 MHz.

Originally Posted by StevenJGore

Only that I use a 32" gaming monitor so 320x200 full screen is mega chunky, so if I could select, say, 640x400, it would show it smaller and centred? I realise this is a really specific use case and not worth implementing just for this!

I see, unfortunately that's not how it works. If the native screen is larger than 320x200, the image will simply show up in the top-left corner. If that's not an issue I can add a tooltype to force it to stay in 640x480.

Originally Posted by Estrayk

Tested in 680060/50 AGA and works smooth. Great work BSzili
btw, I am with the others in recommending that you try to introduce the S3M replayer.

Sure. Even though I didn't mention this in the first post, I always intended to find a solution for the music.

[DanyPPC]

Added a simple Workbench and MagicWB icon:
http://eab.abime.net/zone/DeathRally_Amiga_GI.lha

[BSzili]

Hmm. The file dates are different, but the icons look identical to me.
edit: Sorry, I missed drally.info.

[rabidgerry]

Runs amazingly well on my 060 machine. Never noticed a poor frame rate. Seems like good fun so far (never played the original). Looking forward to exploring it even more. Thanks again BSzili, massive fan of your work.

[jurassicman]

I've finally tested it.
It works very well on my 060/66 MHz.
Only the intro video and the menu are a bit slow but the races are as fast as the original (I know very well this game and I completed it many times on DOS in the ninety's and using DOSBox).
Unfortunately I wasn't able to define the keys on my 2 buttons joystick. I actually set up my favorite configuration (fire1 to accelerate, up to use the machine gun, down to drop mine, etc...) but i wasn't able to save it going back from the configuration menu.
I think that you are doing a great job and I can wait to play with the final release, hopefully with music and configurable input.
Thanks once again for this!

[BSzili]

Thanks for testing! As noted in the first post the gamepad mapping can't be customized. The reason for this is simple: the joystick code from the game was not fully reverse engineered, so I hacked in the controller support with a fixed mapping. The menu you have found does nothing, so I'll make sure to properly disable it to avoid confusing people.