Spectrum Computing

Power Drift is probably the closest available thing to what your describing?

Forgetting the mode 7 aesthetic, you're basically after a proper track based multiplayer racer with laps.

What about using attributes for the walls/track? E.g. dark colours for walls.

Might not look as good but might work for speed. (And simplicity!)

I don't think an attempt to replicate Mode 7 is worth it anyway. I don't like the gameplay where flat textures on the ground are supposed to represent solid, impassable barriers. I'd take the approach of a course made of 3D upright side-walls.

If you want to do a Mode-7-alike with attributes, you could have a 4x2 colour cell bit of multicolour in the botom third of the screen, then do one of those rotating/zooming attribute demo effects to fill it. Though I don't know how readily you could add perspective to a rotozoomer, and you'd have a problem of needing a very large texture/image of the track, as you couldn't build the texture from tiles in real-time like the SNES does.

Another option might be if you could write a sort of chessboard renderer which can draw a floor of square tiles with different textures, kind of like Trailblazer but able to rotate in 3D. Plenty of 16-bit games managed it (e.g. Archipelagos), but I've no idea how they were optimised to run so smoothly.

At least with proper 3D techniques you'd be able to replicate the arena-battle minigames too.

It's really not about "walls" though. The reason Mario Kart works, and why Mode 7 was utterly critical to its success, is the ability to have things like 90 degree turns and be able to see that in real time as you're racing. Classical 8-bit racers absolutely cannot do that, not just because it involves a slightly more complex rendering of karts, but because the kinds of road rendering technique used simply do not allow it. Without that, you really cannot replicate the "feel" of Mario Kart and it requires a lot of hard maths that, for an 8-bit machine, is incredibly difficult to pull off.

I wonder if Spy Hunter could be modified to be played like Mario Kart

I just remembered the infamous driving section in A View to a Kill which had some kind of 3D walls, but rather slowly and only at 90 degree angles.

AndyC wrote: ↑Wed Nov 21, 2018 8:43 pm It's really not about "walls" though. The reason Mario Kart works, and why Mode 7 was utterly critical to its success, is the ability to have things like 90 degree turns and be able to see that in real time as you're racing. Classical 8-bit racers absolutely cannot do that, not just because it involves a slightly more complex rendering of karts, but because the kinds of road rendering technique used simply do not allow it. Without that, you really cannot replicate the "feel" of Mario Kart and it requires a lot of hard maths that, for an 8-bit machine, is incredibly difficult to pull off.

Don't see your problem. Or maybe you're not seeing my solution! Mario Kart 64 has a lot of walled-in tracks. The point is you need the walls, and the track, to be based on a grid map system rather than one of those fake pseudo-3D rolling roads, and to be able to turn right and left and back the way you came in a proper first-person view. You could do a passable Mario Kart game with a Wolfenstein type engine, it just wouldn't be SNES Mario Kart. It'd be better! Like Speed Punks!

What about raycasting? See tutorial with demo https://dev.opera.com/articles/3d-games ... ng-part-1/
https://youtu.be/eOCQfxRQ2pY

Raycasting makes sense if you want to do textured walls, as you need to align the pixel column of the screen with the pixel column of the texture, and the raycasting calculations tell you that. Also maybe if you want a low-res character-column solution like The Dark, since then you only have 32 rays to cast.

If you want more accurate pixel-placed lines in 3D I think you're better off plotting the top or bottom edge line of the wall as a line in 3D space (like something from the undergorund bits of Mercenary) than doing an XOR-fill.

Though maybe there's scope for something in-between. Do the ray-casting in whole character columns but use 1-pixel resolution for the vertical calculations. And maybe slant the top and bottom of each column to make edges look continuous.

I revived my Wolf 3D engine for ATM-Turbo/ZX Evo/Pentagon 2.666LE, added objects and doors:
https://youtu.be/st4saOGcw8E?t=6682

Great idea! Mario Kart is such a brilliant game, and despite its 3D roads, it has a simple, cheerful, sprite-based style that I think would feel at home on the Speccy.

Long ago, I would have thought a game like that completely impossible on the Speccy, but after seeing the speed of the 1997 Doom Pre-Release (and the similar "The Dark"), who knows?

If anyone wanted, I'd be happy to provide accurate AY music for such a project. I love the Mario Kart music and had thought about recreating it on the Speccy (as I've done with other games).

I trust you've all seen this? Not Mario Kart, but a "demake" of SNES Mode 7 racer F-Zero... i.e. very similar concept!

From a technical point of view, it's very impressive. Fun to play too, unlike a number of "tech demo" games!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSQaR9e ... =emb_title

Download link: https://voxeltower.itch.io/spaceracing

Discussion here:
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=5964

Power Drift technically started the whole 3d karting genre and it got a pretty decent conversion on the spectrum.

https://youtu.be/FGkPhPhcB8Y

I’m sure the same engine could have coped with the original SNES Mario Kart levels, although the thing that made Mario Kart stand out was the AI of the other racers. It also set up a truly competitive championship with one or two main competitors. Could the Spectrum do that? The other thing that could have been improved on Powerdrift was making each of the karts look more unique, it was pretty hard to tell who you were overtaking.

Power Drift is still basically an into the screen racer on the Speccy, I'm not sure it could have pulled off the kinds of sharp bends that make Mario Kart work.

It seems to me that perhaps Alone Coder's 3D engine in https://www.spectrumcomputing.co.uk/for ... 3&start=90 might be pretty close to being able to doing the task. With the demo at 3.5 Mhz, you can come pretty close to being a racing game even if the frame rate is slower. I just tried racing around the squares in the demo and was quite playable.

At 7 mhz it certainly can be turned into a Mario Kart type game.

andydansby wrote: ↑Tue Jan 04, 2022 11:00 pm It seems to me that perhaps Alone Coder's 3D engine in https://www.spectrumcomputing.co.uk/for ... 3&start=90 might be pretty close to being able to doing the task. With the demo at 3.5 Mhz, you can come pretty close to being a racing game even if the frame rate is slower. I just tried racing around the squares in the demo and was quite playable.

At 7 mhz it certainly can be turned into a Mario Kart type game.

That is impressive!

Looking at the SNES resolution (256x224) and the area used by each player, a single player mario kart type game would be awesome. Space Racing as a F Zero demake is an incredible achievement on a standard speccy. On the NEXT it could be amazing if you turbo the z80...

Just looking back at some mock ups I've been wondering what it could look like for the last decade!!!

Surely it needs to be multi-player?

Joefish wrote: ↑Thu Jan 06, 2022 8:08 pm Surely it needs to be multi-player?

Baby steps, man...

Joefish wrote: ↑Thu Jan 06, 2022 8:08 pm Surely it needs to be multi-player?

presh wrote: ↑Sat Jan 08, 2022 9:50 pm Baby steps, man...

What I mean is, if you're thinking of multiplayer then you don't want to start out with a full-screen game design; especially when it comes to setting the size of the sprites. You need to consider some sort of windowed view from the outset.

What may be a good start is, instead of trying to reproduce Mode 7, develop an engine that can fill (or erase, from a stippled field) black rectangles mapped onto the ground in 3D (either handling distorted quads, or splitting into two triangles), and make the course out of those, keeping each one as large as possible (i.e. a long straight is just one rectangle).

BiNMaN wrote: ↑Thu Jan 06, 2022 6:37 pm

That is AWESOME BiNMaN!

Though Joefish has a point. The SNES play area was never full screen height, so the Speccy version need not be either.

Inspired by your graphics, I started making one of the music tracks, to prove I can do it!…
https://soundcloud.com/user-211102493/s ... ircuit-wip

I'll have to revisit the screen, the snes screen obviously a different resolution so I'm trying to remember why I came up with this example. The obvious choice in the design was keeping the icons out of the playing area to avoid the need to mask.