Sporadic

Soon* *Probably not though cause I don't have the A+ hours to spare at the moment

I managed to bevel mine with a Dremmel, didn't need to take it out the case either. Just be careful not to go too far and damage the gold fingers.

Saint says in the video that he's going to try and get a long press on the joypad to reset the system.

As mentioned above, from what I've seen, (I think it was Chequered Flag) there was a last.s which just included the relevant labels. That was the last thing linked to.

It is all to do with difficulty level and getting the player to watch the game world instead of the map all the time while playing. Something I have been testing in this version is to only display the map when you collect a powapill.

Cheers! I was thinking something similar while recording the video

Video update time! This shows a couple of new/changed features; - The new radar at the top, giving you a rough location and distance of each Ghost, Powapill and Fruit. - The map at the bottom is now only visible under certain conditions (difficulty level / powapill eaten). - I have also been playing with the wall textures to add some variety for the difficulty levels. These are subject to change of course. - The walls animate now too, adding a glow effect. The video description has time index links you can use to skip to key points.

Have you tried disabling the sound FX to see if that helps the music? Just as a test

Any mileage in reducing the sample rate to reduce the load?

I like the idea of working with the original code, personally. But yes, that is perhaps an option.

Ok try this; In car.s comment out these 4 lines. ; movea.w #(reset_list+Rono+9),a0 ; get address of rain object, 'first pixel' byte ; bsr Rand1 ; get random (word) number in d0 ; bset.l #0,d0 ; make sure release is left on ; move.b d0,(a0) Then these 4 further down (yes they are the same 4 lines); ; movea.w #(reset_list+Rono+9),a0 ; get address of rain object, 'first pixel' byte ; bsr Rand1 ; get random (word) number in d0 ; bset.l #0,d0 ; make sure release is left on ; move.b d0,(a0) Then in objdefs.s comment out these lines; ;ono set ono +1 ;Rono == ono<<4 ; dc.l Ranim ; starts off with data address ; dc.w ScnHt ; Height = full screen ; dc.w ScnSt ; Y start line = start of screen plus 2*line number ; dc.b $40 ; type = 0 (animated) ; ; phrase 1 completed ; dc.b 0 ; no pixel start offset ; dc.b $E ; RMW, trans, release ; dc.b 1 ; CLUT index = 1 ; dc.w 6 ; 384 pixels - so that you won't get clear edge when using pixel offset ; dc.w 5 ; 320 pixels ; dc.b 1 ; pitch = 1 ; dc.b 0 ; depth = 0 = 1 bit / pixel ; dc.w 0 ; X start = 0 This essentially removes the transparent rain object overlay from the game. I'm pretty sure this cured the tearing and sound. I ended up playing with this object and kind of got it working (instead of removing it) but it wasn't right.

Yes I forgot about that happening, I had the same. I'll have a look later, I did manage to sort that out. It's the full screen transparent rain object if I remember correctly, it's killing the OP (it's there all the time even in sunny races). I didn't want to upload my current source because there's various things I've played with and thought best to share the version closest to the original so people can play with that. I also get those compilation filename warnings, I ignored them as they were warnings, not errors. This screen tearing is one of the things I came across that made me think this can't have been the final source.

When I say backgrounds, I mean the sky. I also swapped it to a solid blue blank to try that out. I can't remember off hand where it was. In car.s it's in the gameloop:: code. One of the jsr calls. Towards the end of the loop it calls the rle code? I'm going from memory as I'm not at the pc at the mo.

Excellent news! I also remember it seemed slower than the release version initially, but I can't remember if that was before the backgrounds were added.

Thanks, you're welcome It's all a bit of a blur now, I think I began by reading all I could find in the forum's, developer docs and online. Everything to do with compiling with the tools they used (looking at the makefiles gave a good indication here). I then went through each folder, running the makefile and fixing errors as they occured or searching around for the tool they'd used. For a while, I shoved a dummy lzj file in for the backgrounds just so it would compile (I just took out the draw call). Once I had the main makefile building the abs and running in VJ I got really excited that I'd made it to the end, only to be faced with it crashing on hardware. I think at this point, through looking around the code I figured ram was being used for run time storage of the 3d world and other things. Therefore, running as abs would be out the question. Then I started trying to get the ROM to build - I guessed at the text/data/bss addresses. Once built, the ROM still wouldn't work on hardware. At this point I added an infinite loop containing a background colour poke at the beginning of the code. This showed up on the Jaguar! At this point I was hopeful it was working just not fully. I then started moving the loop down to different sections of the startup code and running it on the Jag always seeing the background colour change until finally it didn't. This then led me to look around the area it failed where are saw the comment "copy data to ROM". Wtf? How's it able to copy to ROM? Was that a typo? No! On the Alpine you could enable writing to the ROM space! I then took out that call and similar looking ones and bingo! It booted to the menu.

Here you go. I didn't want to fill up the source.zip with the BINS, which is why i didn't include them. Hopefully that's it now NMAKER.zip

Lol sorry, did I not include that? Gimmie a mo (sorry, not sure how I missed that)

It is indeed interesting to go through it all. I was the same, i'd not compiled any old Jag sources before so setting up all the old tools via dosbox was a new experience for me. To quickly answer your questions; I did take out various collision checks (i can't remember which). I didn't change the car speed/acceleration but i did mess with the steering speed and the third person camera swing rates/angle. The rev9 source was the only one I could find out there on the interwebs. Certainly nothing that looked newer (and with the missing files). I don't know what else is out there. Not messed with any of the counters or displaying of data. Yes it's very low poly which isn't surprising. All the road markings/arrows etc are all obviously 3d objects too. I think I also messed with removing some of those. Yeah, I also found reading the source amusing and sad at the same time. Some amusing comments in there. It does do 3D stuff on the GPU - there are .GAS files for it. I can't remember if I worked out that the 68k poly code was "old code" which was rewritten on the GPU. There's something like 15 GPU programs in there for various things. I also noticed the demo.s file. I think there is some code perhaps remmed out to call it - but i don't think it was finished. Interesting never the less. I also tried things like changing/taking out the clear screen blitter calls just to see if they were slowing things down but taking them out didn't really effect much. Likewise, taking out the sky draws didn't really make much difference. I'd like to pick it up again and keep looking but i got to a point where i was like "I really should get on with my other projects". But it's been fun to play with as a "change of scenery".

Here's most of the exe's i had to go looking for. This has the file you mention Flag_BIN.zip

Try this one; (I've also been using dosbox, aln, mac etc due to wanting to keep the tools as close to the originals as possible - to rule out other unknowns) NMAKE.zip

hehe, yes, use the ROM. That one worked for me in VJ - i just couldn't test it on HW today. nmake newrom.rom

Hi all, Some of us have been discussing this elsewhere and we thought the AA forum would be a better location. I started messing around with the Checkered Flag source a few months ago with a view to "can it be improved". Before you get excited, the answer is 'not yet'. However, some other guys have started discussing this now too so I thought it would be best to share what I had so far. Before even getting to try and improve it, there were a couple of hurdles; - The "Final Rev9 Source" is missing 7 graphic assets and some ROM compilation set up. - Once you get the ROM built - it runs great in VJ but crashes on real hardware. First up, the assets... Talking to CJ about this, he managed to track them down in the release binary and send them over. Thanks CJ! Next came building the ROM. I played around with the makefile and noticed rom.rsp was also missing from the source. This is the file used to include all the relevant assets in the final binary. There's no way to know what this should have contained so all i've done is copy and rename the big.rsp file (to preserve the original). I then added a new label newrom.rom: to the makefile with some relevant parameters (text,data,bss start addresses etc). It then built a ROM. (I also had to take out all calls in the makefiles to 'touch.exe' as this no longer exists and we shouldn't really need it). The ROM wouldn't work on real hardware. Through further poking around it looks as though (because this was developed on an Alpine) there is code that runs to copy data to the ROM space (and other things). In a read only environment like a skunk at run time, this isn't going to work. However, taking out those calls (by rts-ing them on entry) seemed to do the trick. Finally it was up and running on the Jag. There are two final points regarding things not working; - There are hills/mountains missing - I think this is due to the normal data missing from the 3D dataset. This results in them being culled at run time. If you take out the culling, they appear (along with other artefacts for obvious reasons). - The rain overlay doesn't work correctly. Anyway, attached is a zip containing the source with my changes, the missing assets and a readme.txt that details what i've changed/found/observed etc. The attached source should compile and run on the Jag - but it's been a few months since I tested it. Any problems then shout and i'll fix it up - I just can't test it right now from work. Rik CheckeredFlagRev9-ROMFixed_Sporadic220119.zip

Just want to tell everyone that Starwanders support has been exceptional. I had an issue with one of my controllers and he didn't hesitate to sort it out for me. The controllers are superb and I can't recommend them enough.

Hell yeah! That's now on the list! Cheers!

Hi all, a quick little update on NotOutrun. I thought it would be fun to add the update notes to the video instead.