Turbo Outrun Realtime Scaled?

[Korban]

For no reason in particular I was having a look at some old Amiga sprite based racing games to see which are faster on a faster than stock cpu.
While doing so I discovered that Turbo Outrun is heck of a lot smoother in its updating to a point Im wondering if its actually "realtime" software scaled rather than a series of pre-drawn sprites.
The game itself does some really strange things with other cars movement, graphics glitches, and is actually slower, but its so smooth in the updates of graphics as they get closer that I'd be surprised if it's not realtime scaled.

Anyone have any insight into this, or even just curious to check out what I mean?
I was mostly trying things out on Winuae (for convenience), but I was curious enough to try it on my pistorm+gotek equipped a500 and the behavior is the same there.

Not hugely exciting, but as someone who liked the arcade version and wanted to like the Amiga version I found it interesting.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by Korban

For no reason in particular I was having a look at some old Amiga sprite based racing games to see which are faster on a faster than stock cpu.
While doing so I discovered that Turbo Outrun is heck of a lot smoother in its updating to a point Im wondering if its actually "realtime" software scaled rather than a series of pre-drawn sprites.
The game itself does some really strange things with other cars movement, graphics glitches, and is actually slower, but its so smooth in the updates of graphics as they get closer that I'd be surprised if it's not realtime scaled.

Anyone have any insight into this, or even just curious to check out what I mean?
I was mostly trying things out on Winuae (for convenience), but I was curious enough to try it on my pistorm+gotek equipped a500 and the behavior is the same there.

Not hugely exciting, but as someone who liked the arcade version and wanted to like the Amiga version I found it interesting.

That is another game that need a dive in the code to see what can be fixed and what can be tweaked - first of all a better music and better color palette - HATE that darn almost salmon-ish red -_-

[CCCP alert]

The coding is pathetic, the graphics come directly from the ST. There is nothing to save, only a homebrew update from scratch

[saimon69]

If the street graphic update was better would be a decent mediocre racing game - THAT would be already an improvement, then we can work in better graphics music etc.

[danboid]

Originally Posted by CCCP alert

The coding is pathetic, the graphics come directly from the ST. There is nothing to save, only a homebrew update from scratch

[ Show youtube player ]

[saimon69]

We are talking OCS/ECS here, though; i know many would forget that but lotus did show is possible to have a - would not say exact but similar - experience

[saimon69]

From the ZeusDaz longplay comments

@Waccoon
2 years ago
I did some technical analysis of this game in WinUAE. I was surprised to find that it uses the blitter only about 10% of the time (so the CPU is doing a large portion of the drawing work), and makes absolutely no use of sprites or raster effects. No wonder it's so slow!

It also has the worst rubber-band AI I've ever seen. If you're at full throttle, the opponent literally stays glued to your rear bumper the whole race.

This means someone that is quite cra-er patient could do tweaks to make it run a bit faster

[AestheticDebris]

That might add weight to the idea it's being real-time scaled. If you're doing resizing on the fly, you can't really use the blitter to do it.

[saimon69]

I Think more than resize is the usual plot one /two/three/etc of 16 pixels according to the Z position - that simulate a resize- a crappy one but still

[derSammler]

Originally Posted by saimon69

We are talking OCS/ECS here, though; i know many would forget that but lotus did show is possible to have a - would not say exact but similar - experience

True. But what people also often forget is that there is a *huge* difference between a game that was conceived for the Amiga from the outset, and a game that was ported from some other system to the Amiga. And when the Atari ST is part of the equation as well, better run.

[saimon69]

8 and 16-bit Consoles did went around that by tweaking things, and people did not expect the full arcade experience, we know

[CCCP alert]

There is no real time scaling, it is the usual quality of coding for the dev group, the ST version runs a little bit faster and uses the same 16 colour graphics for the game engine IIRC.

[Cris1997XX]

Just make a new AGA version, simple

[kremiso]

interesting
there is also Top Gear 2 that runs like garbage on 68000/68020 ,but seems it starts to behave 'better' with 68030 and after :

https://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p...7&postcount=29


about Turbo Outrun, this cut is from the whdload page :

"The game had a major problem on fast machines, it was simply unplayable
because there was no timing at all. Since the code is very slow on a
plain 68000 A500 coder didn't feel like adding any sync with the raster
beam hence game is unplayable on fast machines. I have fixed this, if
you run the game on slow machines (or simply want to have some "fun") you
can disable the timing fix with CUSTOM1."

[saimon69]

After i have seen this, i wish someone take the time to tweak the old engine for better perfomance and transform that abort in a decent racing game!
[ Show youtube player ]

[VladR]

Originally Posted by saimon69

After i have seen this, i wish someone take the time to tweak the old engine for better perfomance and transform that abort in a decent racing game!
[ Show youtube player ]

Yeah, but what resolution is that running at ? Looks like, at the very least, 640x480, but likely more. There's no info on the game in the YT description, so I won't try to guess more.

At 640x480, you won't get 60 fps even on Vampire V4 in RTG mode.

It took 3DFX on PC to run 640x480 smooth for racing games.

I recall playing NFS1/Screamer2 at an abysmall framerate on Pentium 100 MHz at 640x480. And that was 30 yrs ago. Today I would get headache from such framerate in a racing game (turn-based strategy would be fine, however) under 15 seconds...

[AestheticDebris]

Originally Posted by VladR

Yeah, but what resolution is that running at ? Looks like, at the very least, 640x480, but likely more. There's no info on the game in the YT description, so I won't try to guess more.

At 640x480, you won't get 60 fps even on Vampire V4 in RTG mode.

It took 3DFX on PC to run 640x480 smooth for racing games.

I recall playing NFS1/Screamer2 at an abysmall framerate on Pentium 100 MHz at 640x480. And that was 30 yrs ago. Today I would get headache from such framerate in a racing game (turn-based strategy would be fine, however) under 15 seconds...

NFS1 and Screamer 2 were both polygon based racers, a Pentium PC was more than capable of a 2D sprite based racer with a fake perspective road like Turbo Outrun.

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by kremiso

interesting
there is also Top Gear 2 that runs like garbage on 68000/68020 ,but seems it starts to behave 'better' with 68030 and after :

https://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p...7&postcount=29

Interesting. This is indeed the case but only for the OCS version. The AGA version still being sluggish and without barely any gfx difference except for a slightly better dithered sky (as said in your link)
What a strange beast. An other iteration of the unfamous Fake AGA games except this one is even better in its OCS incarnation.

[VladR]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

NFS1 and Screamer 2 were both polygon based racers, a Pentium PC was more than capable of a 2D sprite based racer with a fake perspective road like Turbo Outrun.

Granted, Screamer 2 was a full 6-DOF textured racer, so it's [in a sense] a Quake of racers (compared to the rather simplistic NFS1), hence it was inevitably very demanding and was dropping frames on Pentium even at 320x200.

I seriously doubt that Pentium could pull off a 60-fps-lock 640x480 scanline racer. Perhaps with some very fast 2D card in the system, but certainly not the typical S3 of the era (let alone the cheaper ones).


640x480 is 4.8x more pixels than 320x200, so it's questionable. Pentium doesn't have that much leg up over legacy 80486.

Maybe there was such racer on PC at the time of NFS1 and I simply missed it. Do you have any such examples ?


Now, if somebody was to write a hand-optimized ASM bitmap scaling code for Pentium, maybe...

MMX-based code (166 MHz Pentium) - yes - those were fast enough for this, but 75-100 MHz, it's doubtful.

[alexh]

Originally Posted by VladR

I recall playing NFS1/Screamer2 at an abysmall framerate on Pentium 100 MHz at 640x480. And that was 30 yrs ago.

40 years ago today. P100 launched on March 7th 1994