/vr/ - Retro Games

I think this belongs here

Are you ready for next Sunday? Have you tuned your car, prepared for qualifying?

Indianapolis 500 - The Simulation

>>2897323
3 years older. To this day my favorite "sim", with graphics and physics that are surprisingly close to NASCAR Racing or Indycar Racing.

>>2885590
If you think NASCAR Racing is impressive, take a look at the first racing simulation by Papyrus, Indianapolis 500.

>At the time, many people still had 4.77 MHz 8088 PC's, the 80286 based AT machines were fairly new, and the smoking hot top-end machines were 25 Mhz386's - with EGA graphics! Remember that flight simulators were considered good at the time if they got frame rates above 8-10 fps. I felt it was important to have the highest frame rate possible, and I was confident that we could get up to 15 fps sustained! I also wanted to have a full field of 33 cars (player plus 32 AI cars), since this was Indy. So everything was written in assembly language, for speed. Space was also at a premium, since we couldn't use more than about 570K of RAM. Writing the physics in assembler, using fixed-point math, was one large challenge. Another was creating a graphics database that looked like the speedway, but used no more than about 30 polygons per frame! (We use that many polys in a tire, today.) The other main challenge was getting the CPU to drive 32 AI cars without slowing to a crawl.

>>2858290
Next up, realism. Anon said that the lack of realism back then was a motivation. I'd like to counter that with Indianapolis 500. The game was arguably a hardcore sim, at least for its time. However, the game had a technical limit to deal with: 16 colors VGA. That's all it had for the entire screen. With these few colors the game had to do the circuit, all cars, the sky, and maintain a uniform artstyle. Its clouds are a lot like Outruns, and the reason is the same. Dithering, while certainly possible, would just confuse the artstyle, lead to a clash. The game does have a few dithered colors and objects, but it's always a 50% mesh, and used sparingly, like for smoke, or the tire variants (because the number of greys was too low). So, despite the game being a hard sim, it's still fairly colorful, out of technical necessity.

>>2732786
I dunno, when Doom was still using sprites, Indy 500 performed polygonal racer 5 years earlier.

>>2713874
FCEUX or nestopia work great. I prefer FCEUX

Let's bring some actual quality to this thread

>>2515161
For you. While not a "clever aesthetic design" and hence not entirely on topic, to me it's one of the most beautiful simple 3D games and still holds up exceptionally well.

>>2453068
wrong

Have you watched the race? Have you played the race? Have you won the race?

Are you ready for the Month of May?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indianapolis_500_traditions#Month_of_May