If you've never heard of Super Mario Kart, then I guess you were living in a cave, as this game series which first appeared in 1992 on the SNES, was one of the most addictive arcade style racing games ever to appear on a TV screen. So to see someone try to create a Mario Kart like experience on the Amiga certainly caught my interest! Welcome to Micro Karting, a small proof-of-concept to see if a 3D-ish kart racing game can be done on Amiga AGA without cheating.
Here's the latest. "Everything is written in raw 68020 assembly and tested on real hardware. It runs surprisingly well on a totally stock, unexpanded Amiga 1200, but with Fast RAM and/or an accelerator it gets smoother and more stable (less pain for the CPU). No engines, no system friendly code. Just chipset, fixed-point math, hand-rolled routines and a lot of guess-and-retry. The goal is not visuals, but gameplay feel: steering must stay responsive even when the machine is clearly sweating. Chunky to planar conversion is done using c2p.library, mainly to show how good and fast this free Amiga library actually is, even in a very demanding real-time scenario."
- This is not a finished game, not even close. It’s a tech demo, a playground, and a personal experiment to understand how far you can bend an Amiga before it snaps.
This already looks like so much fun! Love the simplicity of the design.
ReplyDeleteVery impressive and fast but we already have Ultimate Racing for AGA machines which is a very decent Mario Kart alternative in my opinion.
ReplyDeleteI can't seem to find a video for Ultimate Racing, but street racer comes close :)
DeleteI think he was meant Virtual Karting and Virtual Karting 2...
DeleteI don't see how is it a reason to NOT having other options, it's like "we already have mario kart, so we don't need Extreme G or Wipeout"
DeleteI never got into kart racing games until Crash racing on PSX because there wasn't anything like this for the Amiga. Of course later I fell in love with the genre. The platform could of used a game like this to complement the aga Amigas and cd32.
DeleteXtreme racing rather
DeleteAs mentioned, Ultimate Xtreme Racing already exists and it has jungle music. This tech demo looks like it is running at a higher framerate, but that's expected from a tech demo.
ReplyDeleteI know about Amiga limitations, but could it be possible to make the playing screen bigger and the map at the bottom smaller?
ReplyDeletean sprite overlay would be even preferable, for example, if it's on the very top, no other sprite would never be in front of it.
other than that, and, those are just suggestions, the tech demo looks amazing, congrats!
Great little Demo,Glad people are trying. My suggestion when making ANY Game on ANY console or the Amiga, is: ALWAYS pretend it is going into an actual CRT Arcade machine. That means it HAS TO be FULL SCREEN OVERSCAN. It looks so unprofessional when this is what the Amiga was touted as...an Arcade quality at home Game System/ Computer. Pacmania, Project-X, Zool 2 are examples of this achivement. They demonstrate the Amiga certainly can. Ontop of that, Zool 2 and Project-X are PAL only...which is a bit slower than NTSC... Imagine they made the game on NTSC to squeeze more Juice out of the Amiga! PLEASE use ALL of the screen Real Estate with FLOATING transparent scores and not RASTERS that cut off the action.
ReplyDeleteAn ntsc amiga has less processing power to have to update the screen at 60 fps.. If you write this in 60fps and overscan then do it my friend! processing time is not unlimited and even an 020 will struggle to do what a snes can , like an snes cant do 3d or wordprocess or deluxe paint!!!
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