chicane

Hi all. I'm working on a new "into the screen" racer for 1 meg STE machines. The intention is to create the first racer of this type for the STE running at a super-smooth 50 frames per second. No binary yet, but there's a video over on Twitter/X:

I've put together a YT video detailing some of the technical challenges and associated solutions during the development of Lotus STE. I'll make more of these if people indicate that they like this kind of content. Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-QHSAiYO_M

Atari Legend has produced a great YouTube vid detailing the history of Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge, starting with Lotus on the Amiga and ending with this STE enhanced version. It's well worth a watch - please do check it out and tell anybody else you think may be interested!

Thanks a lot! I've posted a link on my Twitter feed so you may see some incoming traffic ?

Thanks for doing this HDD adaptation! Will you be hosting on your website? I'd like to link to it from Twitter.

It's better to run it at 16MHz if you can. It'll look the same, but you should see a steady 25fps rather than the 15-25fps range you'd get when running at 8MHz.

Thanks Peter. Not sure I'm ready to put in a TT software emulation of the Blitter for the 3 TT owners that might play it, but you never know! As you say, next up is a long rest to recover from Lotus STE! I like the Blitter game adaptations you've written. Have you ever considered publishing the source code for us all to learn from?

Thanks! Now that I think about it, our Lotus STE code writes to the Microwire registers, so the game wouldn't work on the Falcon even with the stackframe fixes I believe you applied to your original Lotus 1 hard disk adaptation. We'll add some code in for the next version that detects the Falcon and avoids writing to the Microwire if it is a Falcon - then we can pass it back to you for fixing of the stackframe The game will never be TT compatible due to our heavy reliance on the Blitter.

Thanks Peter - I don't have a great understanding of what you're working on but I know it'll be greatly appreciated by the community! If you let me know when you're done with this, I'll put a message out on Twitter to let people know. Will your hard disk adaptation patch the game to work on F030 too?

Thanks! Yeah, that suits me, I'll develop the games by 1990's standards and other people can drag them kicking and screaming into the 21st century. I've not owned real ST hardware since 1993

Thanks Peter! Here's our loader code that contains the hardware detection: https://github.com/jonathanopalise/lotus-ste/blob/master/src/loader.s Please note that we are doing some things in Lotus STE that are probably considered to be breaking the rules - like loading a 512 block of code and data at 0x80000 without allocating or checking that memory in any way. Just something you may want to be aware of

Thanks for sorting that out - it's a great help to the community. Glad you enjoyed the game!

I'd love to help but none of this means anything to me! The only ST hardware I know is the ST hardware that existed and was affordable to the common man in 1992!

I'm afraid the version 1.0 of this game is an old fashioned "bare metal" game like the boxed games you'd have bought in the 80's and early 90's - it's intended to be played on an autobooting floppy with no hardware present. Any additional hardware or drivers in memory are likely to cause you pain. We could look at fixing this for future releases but it wasn't a priority for us in the initial release.

The 1.0 final version of Lotus STE has now been released! Please see https://twitter.com/RetroRacing/status/ ... 7229830147 for the announcement and a download link. Shares, RTs, FB posts, YT vids, live streams etc all very much appreciated - let's get the word out to as many STE fans as possible!

Thanks - appreciate your support!

Thanks - we're looking forward to seeing how people respond to the release of this updated version!

Thanks a lot for your support - it means a lot!

It's normally anywhere from 15-25fps, but it looks very smooth doesn't it! When run on an STFM with Blitter, there's no sound mixing to do and the framerate is very close to that of the Amiga version.

Hi all, Just a quick heads up that this weekend we'll be releasing a 1.0 final version of the STE enhanced edition of Lotus 1 that we've been working hard on for the last 3-4 months. I'll post again when there's a download link available.

Hi everyone, I'm the author of this ST Pole Position conversion. I though you might be interested to know that I've just posted up a video on YouTube (http://youtu.be/KLKrqcY88aU) showing the latest build. There's been some rather drastic work on performance lately so this might well be of interest to those who liked the idea but not the frame rate. Feedback and comments most welcome!