In the late 80's, Geoff Crammond released the incredible game of ' Stunt Car Racer '. It involved you the player, racing around a 3D track in a first person view using a vehicle which had boost capabilities. It was also one of the greatest racing games ever released and what made it so great was the fact that all of the tracks were like rollercoasters, with such dangerous driving and incredible heights involved it would've killed anyone if it was real life. But this month as a bit of a shock, a coder by the name of Vesuri has released an Amiga version of Stunt Car Racer that's running at a smooth 50/60fps. Something Amiga owners have been wanting for a very long time.
Available through GitHub, Amiga homebrew developer Vesuri / dA JoRMaS released the impressive new modification for Geoff Crammond’s seminal 3D racer, Stunt Car Racer (originally published by MicroStyle). Dubbed the Framerate Unleashed edition, this patch unlocks the classic title to run at a full 50 or 60 frames per second. Crucially, the upgrade modernizes the visual fluidity without altering the original game speed or its famously precise physics engine.
While this is a massive leap forward for the classic title that has been requested for many years, there is a catch for purists however. The modification is designed for high-end Amiga setups equipped with fast CPUs and fast memory. Because the engine now demands significantly more processing power to calculate the extra frames, a stock Amiga 500 will probably not see any performance improvement. To achieve this feat, the developer painstakingly disassembled the original game binary using the popular Amiga tool ReSource. Throughout a detailed analysis of the assembly code, labels were manually renamed to understand the inner workings of Crammond's engine. For transparency and future modders, all changes to the original code structure are explicitly documented within the source using specific comment tags like ; added, ; removed, ; originally, and ; fixed.
- Written by Vesuri / dA JoRMaS — vesuri@jormas.com.
- The WHDLoad slave is partially based on the work by Codetapper/Action! & StingRay.
- Original game (1989): Geoff Crammond / MicroStyle.
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So what specs are we looking at to run it at a consistent 60fps? There are no mentions on the Git page.
ReplyDeleteA1200? Hopefully the dev gives us some idea 💡
DeleteIt is known to run mostly 60 FPS on an Amiga 1200 with a 68040 at 40MHz and 20 FPS on an Amiga 600 with a 68020 at 18MHz, so the minimum spec for a smooth framerate is somewhere in between.
DeleteVery nice to see this unlocked at 50/60 FPS. A great game back in the day made even better. Now if only we could get Formula 1 Grand Prix to run at 50/60 FPS, or has that been attempted already?
ReplyDelete