Retro racing fans have a rare opportunity to experience a piece of "lost" Amiga history with the latest demo 5 download of SpeedManiaX, a Super Cars like racer, that Luigi Recanatese says "is intended to represent the evolution of the game 30 years after its conception". While Aminet currently hosts the most recent version, Demo 5, which was uploaded in late April 2026, provided below is a bit of back story, as well as some gameplay footage from Saberman.
According to Gamesthatweren't who mentioned this game back in 2021-2023. SpeedManiaX (once known simply as Speed Mania) was a highly ambitious project that eventually evolved into a title called Brutal Speed. In issue 65 of Italian Games Machine, the game was previewed as an AGA chipset powerhouse featuring 8-directional scrolling and a vibrant palette of 128 colours, drawing comparisons to classics like Super Cars 2 and Neo Drift. Despite its promise, the original project was cancelled after the development team suffered a devastating hardware failure on their A4000 hard drive, resulting in the loss of nearly all data.
- This version only works on any Amiga with 2 Mb of ram chip. This limitation is because this is a demo. Not all features are available.
- The developer, now primarily working at XTeam Software, notes that this release is strictly a demo intended to showcase the game's growth since its 1990s inception. As such, not all features are currently functional.
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Vibrant palette of 128 colors? Looks like 16, and not even a good 16.
ReplyDeleteWell that was a 90s preview from a magazine 😛
Delete32 colours + 16. ;) Luigi. Thank you very much.
ReplyDeleteHello. Thank you for the visibility. I have never seen so many likes!! As a developer, I want to correct some extra information. The game is 32 colors, the score panel is 16. I decided to resume an incomplete game. The original version available on the net was for software houses that usually replied "I like it, but...". XTeam is a friend. He appears as a driver in the game.
Deletelooks more like Overdrive (without the stupid speed). The enemy cars are all yellow but playing with the bitplanes and the color indexes it is probably possible to add one more color (unless there's a 2nd player in store). They did that on Supercars 2, allowing 3 different car colors on screen with the same bitplane data, just in a different order.
DeleteYes, the method is correct. I have to understand how to do it. I need to understand how the color palette is made. Surely it is easier for me to load two other cars into memory if Amiga has 1 Mbyte of chip memory.
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