As an 8088 democoder, I absolutely love this video. I've had the same idea to disassemble it and try to fix it, but it's always been too laborious. Keep up the great work! Bonus points for showing Sourcer!
Truly fantastic work and such a great channel. A few years ago I manually typed out and compiled every chapter program from Michael Abrash's wonderful "Graphics Programming" (the Black Book) using Turbo C/Turbo Assembler in DOS Box, and the resulting EXE files all ran perfectly (in DOS Box of course). I'm now dabbling in DirectX 12 & DXR (hardware raytracing) programming, but your mini-class in the practicalities of game programming in x86 assembly for the pre-Windows era was such a nostalgic trip down memory lane. Test Drive III was also one of my favourites of all time, despite the frustrating performance on 386! Also loved your history of the remake/remaster as pioneered by Sierra & LucasArts. Here's hoping your channel grows to the viewership of retro colleagues LGR, RMC Cave and Perifractic... you deserve to be there!
This channel is really cool, I'm not even really all that interested in a lot of the subjects you cover, but the presentation makes the videos interesting
There's a couple projects I'm following working on source porting old games but because of how certain companies can be with C&Ds, even without legal precedent, they're keeping it on the DL. I wouldn't be surprised that there's more open source projects being worked on than we're aware about.
One of my projects is to extract the _Test Drive 3_ map and display it in HTML5 via WebGL but I’m backlogged with a few other projects first. 24:08 Oh sweet, Sebastian already extracted the map! Nice!
The best part of open source recreations are the ability to add usermade content. I'm hoping for openSource recreations of old the first 5 NFS games, or Carmageddon. Midtown Madness (from what I've seen) is has a good shot of someday becoming open source though there's still plenty of ground to cover.
Here's hoping! There's some progress already on a couple of those that I know of. Carmageddon - Dethrace: github.com/dethrace-labs/dethrace (the team also have some good blog posts and detail on why some of this stuff is difficult, and some interesting videos from when things go wrong) Midtown Madness - Open1560: github.com/0x1F9F1/Open1560
I worked on NFS1 (PS1). The physics engine ran at 100 Hz while rendering ran at 30 Hz. The car was treated as a motorcycle (front wheel, rear wheel) IIRC. I _might_ have saved an internal whitepaper on how the physics worked but I’ll have to check.
Test drive 3, the amount of hours I played it and crashed because it ran too fast. I would love to get more 90s games to be open-source. Keep the good content coming sir😎
you mention the crappy controls at 24:45. i can confirm that version 3.0 of the game, the final known version, actually improves the controls quite a bit. have you taken a look at the three versions and compared?
I only have 1.0 and 3.0 available, I seem to end up with the problem that 1.0 is oversensitive on the straights, but then 3.0 doesn't give me enough steering lock on the tighter turns. I'm not sure how I dealt with it back in the '90s, although maybe I just drove a lot slower and accepted not getting great section times!
Love your channel! Do you know Geoff Graham's Colour Maximite 2 Basic-programmable computer? As it is blazing fast, I wonder if it was possible to program an engine to run the original Tomb Raider games. Do you think it's possible? Cheers! 🧡
Not heard of it before! Depending on speed there are some compromises (especially if using BASIC with a slow interpreter) but people have got Quake-like engines running on a ZX Spectrum, some sort of result must be possible even if it ends up flat-shaded and a bit choppy :)
Here's your "Well actually what about" comment before I watch the rest of the video. I just live with the conviction that every open source game project that currently exists is a small miracle only granted to the chosen few of the games. And that number of ultra-wizards that can will them into existence is woefully minuscule. Which makes me even more shocked that Driver 2 of all games has an unofficial PC port in form of REDRIVER 2.
It's incredible with the amount of effort required that so many people have stepped up and contributed their free time to keep so many old games alive, even the less well-received ones. (Arguably, those are the ones most in need of reimagining and improvement!)
test drive iii was amazing to me as a kid. although td1 and 2 had been fun enough, the ability to drive offroad and *explore* was far more engaging for me than racing. loved this game!
Absolutely, I loved the exploring and the feeling of just driving around finding stuff down side roads. There's a few good easter eggs in some of the maps too, one of them has a hidden oval track.
Well actually earlier in 2027 they released a full remake of Test Drive 3. ssh.. I'm trying to will it into existence, if someone reads this in 5 years they'll never know!
If you're talking "full remake" it's not outside the bounds of reasonability to argue that Unlimited sets out to achieve most of the same goals of 3, but with vastly better technology and budget.
V-Drift, it's the car game on the right-hand screen at this point. (Although the track is older, it was originally created for Ruud van Gaal/Dolphinity's Racer)
The segmented memory stuff is painful and compared to the Motorola 68000 with its nice set of general purpose and address registers I always found myself running out of registers or being told "you can't put that in there" on x86... but it is quite satisfying, it's almost like a puzzle compared to high level programming in that you have a small number of pieces which will fit and you know what the result should look like, but actually working out what goes where is the challenge.
My best learning years were obviously mis spent because while I can understand what's going on here there is no chance in hell of my ever being able to make anything with spice86. The worst possible place to be in the knowledge curve
