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How Death Rally Got Ported
An anonymous reader writes "Last year, I got the opportunity to port Remedy Entertainment's Death Rally to modern platforms off its original MS-DOS sources. I wrote an article about the porting process for Game Developer magazine, and now I've posted the text of the article for general consumption. 'The source software platform was DOS, Watcom C, and some Dos4GW-style DOS extender. The extender basically meant you could use more than 640k of memory, and would not need any weird code for data larger than 64k. The game displayed in VESA 640x480 and MCGA 320x200 graphics modes, all with 8-bit palettes; there was no true color anywhere. There were also some per-frame palette change tricks that emulators have trouble with. The source code was mostly pure C with a couple dozen inline assembly functions. There were a few missing subsystems, specifically audio and networking, which would have to be replaced completely anyway, as well as one file for which the source code was lost and only a compiled object was available.'"
...by clicking "Click To Reply" (and using some inline assembler)
I take it dos-box didn't work?
There was no true color anywhere
"We are Samurai, the Keyboard...Cowboys"
...playing Autoduel.
"some Dos4GW-style DOS extender"
"would not need any weird code for data larger than 64k."
A little too folksy for this crowd I'm afraid.
Did you bother to RTFA?
As did I. Quake, Duke3D, Shadow Warrior, and Death Rally all came out in 1996 and I still play them regularly after all this time. I wonder what is it about those early years that keeps their games so appealing over time. Maybe they focused more on gameplay than graphics.
It's already been slashdotted to death.
How does it compare to Death Track or Death Track Resurrection?
Your link is busted.
There was no true color anywhere
The GNAA?
I remember when this game came out. It was created by some members of the demo group Future Crew. The soundtrack features track(s) by Purple Motion.
I wonder what the code looked like! Demoscene coders were known to optimize the heck out of it for speed. I remember this game was super impressive and smooth on the barely-pentium computers in 1996. Not to mention fun.
Copy from Google Cache:
Dilbert RSS feed
why dont people use the coral cache anymore???
all you do is add nyud.net to the domain and no more slashdot effect, e.g http://www.remedygames.com.nyud.net/games/deathrally
It's not a typo if you understood the meaning!
I used to play this game all the time in high school. I installed the port and played it for 40 minutes just now. I needed to tear myself away it was so fun! I still remembered the little tricks like lagging behind for the first quarter of the first lap so the other cars would deplete their ammo on themselves instead of you. And I never realized that the item on the track that got you "drunk" was actually a mushroom!
Nothing compares to them. Back in the day, you and I use to think about their stories and dream-up our own to fill-in the "holes" where the stories of these titles had holes. In effect, we also created a culture for ourselves to echo the involvement of our favorable marketing to our friends on how such a great game *pat*on*the*back* should be shared to our friends and play it together using our crippled network environment. Everything after these games will only compare to these games, because we're the one's that made Halo and Doom3; sure, they're appealing, but the story is soooo perfect that it lacked the fun-factor of ego that prevents each player from bleeding his or her own style onto the in-game model/actor. When you logged-in to a server of Quake3/Tremulous of Halo and you were fighting next-to some-other Finish or Nordic-like challenger named "Duke Bot", then you f*cking know that pretty graphics is all out the window becaus now it's about whoever has the rapid-response skills if not Wallhack to shake that AI.
Also, Death Rally was cool because just like what ID Software did to let Commander Keen into some of the last levels of Doom1, it is our beloved horny Hero on Steroids with a shotgun: Duke Nukem: that makes an appearance in Death Rally as a top-rated racer usually within 4th-place of the top drivers.
Of'course if you read this far in my post, then I'll let you know that I just made this all up. That's righht, just like the coders that made Rise of The Triad, I'm just a shell of a man that just wanted to show-off my skills to prod my childhood like I'm Adam "buttf*ck" Sessler to force everyone to think I'm a witty cunt just like Morgan "lowerjaw" Webb. I was originally going to write about about Nazzis, but the fine folks at ID already pushed their golden-star at my face so I'm just writing about something else that has 8 star-points instead of a 6-pointed star.
Warggarhhhhggggbbllleee!
Or the MacOSX version. Doesn't seem that hard to port a DOS game to those other platforms at the same time, given that an old DOS game isn't going to use a bunch of Windows APIs that are tough to port.
I don't consider that a port: that's an abortion.
Head on over to CurmudgeonGamer.Com and get something more worth your while. What are they secretly booting a modified VM with FreeDOS and then running Death Rally.exe as a shell and trapping anyone from seeing what they're doing? Just...just stop ruining my memories, all you 6-year-olds that watched me play when the games came out. Now all these young-blood 22-year-old College students are earning their U$30K College-duhploma debt and start nagging at my pristine gaming memories by tampering with purrfffect code of the passssttttt.
The Specs! NoooooooOOO!
It's time for a game of Six Degrees of Separation: Future Crew Edition
The music's composer was Jonne Valtonen, however for any of you familiar with the PC demoscene, you'd probably better recognize him as Purple Motion. In the early-to-mid 90s, Purple Motion was a member of the Future Crew, the famous Finnish demo group responsible for the legendary demo Second Reality, the same demo on which Purple Motion was the principle musician.
The Future Crew often wrote their own tools; one of those tools was Scream Tracker. Purple Motion didn't write it (he wasn't a coder nor a member of the Future Crew at the time), but it was the tracker software he used for all of the Future Crew demos he worked on. Ultimately he's responsible for a number of the masterpieces written in Scream Tracker.
This brings us to Death Rally. When the Future Crew split up in 1995, the bulk of the members gravitated towards a new company started by former Future Crew members: Remedy Entertainment. Remedy is of course is the developer of Death Rally and Purple Motion was one of the Future Crew members to move to Remedy.
And thus, this is why the music for Death Rally is written in Scream Tracker 3. Death Rally's music composer came from the group that created Scream Tracker in the first place, and that was the tracker software that he had the bulk of his composing experience with. And while I obviously can't speak for him, I'd imagine he preferred S3M.
How about a port of the original Carmageddon? It was DOS with the DOS extender and had decent graphics on VooDoo cards. Of the three in the series, it was the most fun to play.
Nah, it's just they were great games. Daikatana is as old as those you mentioned, but I don't think there's a single Slashdotter that'd submit himself to play it again if they even finished it the first time around.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Why don't companies take advantage of free porting? Just drop your old sources online, tell us how you want us to license our new source code, and let us sort it out. Only you have the right to sell a game with that copyrighted content still in it, so it's not like you're giving anything away.
I submitted this to /. a few days ago, but I guess no one cares:
"The Demoscene Documentary, with an embedded video that seems to show English closed captions/subtitles overlay correctly, and Pouet mention a seventeen minutes and 10 seconds Finnish YouTube video (turn on its "Transcript" option to read the English texts to go with the video) showing a "documentary episode about the world famous Finnish demogroup, Future Crew. First presented at Assembly 2010..."
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoduel
http://CryoLANparty.com/ A lan I'm staff on!
These were fun games, and it was really cool to be able to interact with objects in a 3D environment that was being generated on the fly, but modern games look and react better. You just happened to be there when we moved from side scrollers to 3D worlds, and it's like the first girl you ever kissed: there's nothing really that special about her, except to you.
Like how baby boomers still like the Rolling Stones.
It didn't perform good enough under DOSBox.
visit my pal the xkcd explainer!
This game sounds a lot like a game from 1989 called Death Track.
It was a racing game which featured purchasing lethal weapons. Mines, machine guns etc.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deathtrack
Strangely that is the motive behind the port. I myself never had any problem with Death Rally on a Sempron computer.
p.s. changing output to something other than "surface" on Nvidia and Intel hardware will cure your "poor performance" problems in DOSBox. nvidia sucks at 8-bit color palette management. Crippled games... it's the way it's meant to be played. Screw them and buy COD:BO for your GTX. You're supposed to play that and not have your own decisions you lowly consumer human. You're not playing the way we meant our hardware to play.
Im afraid this analogy does not work in Slashdot...
I started reading Snow Crash two days ago.There is a car called the "Deliverator" in Death Rally. Awesome! (game shot)
For years I've wanted to port Dark Sun I and II to modern architectures. Since the games have been released as freeware a few years ago, I don't think there's any good reason to avoid such a port; however, I've been unable to track down someone who can give me access to the source code (and I have good reasons to believe it does exist somewhere).
If anyone happens to know who may be contacted regarding this, please let me know...
My website
So, why is this game called Death Rally? I had some vague memory of it, and sure enough I played it for a while back when it was new. There's no running people over for points. There are spectators on the race track but you get nothing for mowing them down, in fact it's a bad idea as it slows your car.
I'm surprised this got republished at all. It's got Duke Nukem in it with his portrait, and he says, "Hail to the King, baby!" when he wins the race. It also has a digitized sample of Tommy Chong saying, "Whoa, man" in his best pothead voice (when you run over the hallucinogenic mushroom that makes the screen sway crazily around - it's this VGA screen warping routine that I'm sure was utterly useless but the author repurposed to this clever end).
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
... the article about porting the game and I found it interesting. It would be better, though, to be open source and would be able to compare the changes in the code, just for educational purposes. Recently I came across with a rather interesting article describing the process of porting the open source code of Doom to iPhone.
Until the skies turn blue...
Until the air of freedom strikes us...
... the article and I found it interesting. But it would be more interesting if the code was open source and could see all these changes with our eyes, just for educational purposes. A nice article that I came across lately just review the code of Doom which ported to iPhone by iD.
Until the skies turn blue...
Until the air of freedom strikes us...
Thanks for fixing the link. I am sofa king we todd did.
Daikatana is as old as those you mentioned,
Daikatana was originally planned to release Christmas of '97, so even if it had released on time, it would be a year newer than the others mentioned. Of course, it was finally excreted onto the market in 2000, so it's by no means as old as those mentioned.
Looking back at "classic" games is always done through the microscope of nostalgia. You remember the good ones and forget most of the rest, (with the exceptions of memorable cockups like Daikatana.) Anyone remember the glut of FPS's shortly after Doom? Or the RTS glut shortly after C&C and Warcraft?
Redundancy is good And also good.
Second Reality, the same demo on which Purple Motion was the principle musician
If I remember correctly (and I do since I still have the S3M files), the soundtrack for Second Reality was split between Purple Motion (Jonne Valtonen) and Skaven (Peter Hajba). In fact, Skaven's contribution to the soundtrack totals a little over 8 minutes while Purple Motion's contribution is only about 6 minutes and 45 seconds.
Not a lot of modern FPS react better than Quake.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Quake, Duke3D, ... Maybe they focused more on gameplay than graphics.
I'm amused at the irony of referring to games like Quake as "gameplay rather than graphics" :)
When Quake came out, the most notable thing about it was how it was pushing the graphics barrier. Sure Quake was fun too, but I still remember people sitting around saying "But all these older games I like playing from the 80s are so much more fun, developers should concentrate on gameplay rather than graphics!" And indeed, the FPS genre since then has been the main one that such criticisms have been made against.
Shadow warrior probably has the best lines of any video game ever! "Whoo wants some Waanngg" or "Do you want to wash wang? Or do you want to watch Wang wash wang? "
$ unzip, strip, touch, finger, grep, mount, fsck, more, yes,fsck,fsck,fsck,umount, sleep
People like to chalk it up to nostalgia but it's not true. Many older games are better in every way than their modern counterparts save for the graphics and physics.
I played Deus Ex and System Shock 2 for the first time in 2008, nearly a decade after they were released. They're now my favourite games of all time.
My favourite strategy game is X-Com. I played that for the first time in 2009, 15 years after release.
I played Doom 2 in 2007, three years after Doom 3. The latter is fun, but a stinking turd in comparison to its masterfully designed predecessor.
The list goes on and on. I've played almost every major modern videogame released for the PC. In a lot of genres the bar was set a decade ago and has yet to be reached again.
From the article, regarding re-implementation of assembly functions:
That's the joy of programming in a nut shell!
Says the guy who hasn't played anything since Quake.
Now they just have to do this with a good game.
Remember to pick the Duke Nukem character and name it appropriately. You'll get extra an Duke comment when you win :-)
The guy says it was open sourced... where is the source code?
Just because the U.S. is a republic does not mean it is not a democracy. Democracy/republic are not mutually exclusive.
This game is available for full download from the developer's website last time I checked. The grpahics and top down bird's eye view was one of the features that made the game "stand out" . V simimilar to the first GTA that came out althought that took the top down view to a whole new level in terms of scale being not just a race track but an entire city. Anyways bk to the article - interesting bit of news I didnt know lol
You have to be a true old-school coding geek to enjoy articles such as these. Luckily I'm a true old-school coding geek.
I hadn't played anything too seriously since Quake3 and Unreal Tournament 2K4. Truly fun competitive FPS seems have died after that. I do greatly enjoy the Left 4 Dead franchise however, which goes to show that the genre isn't a complete bust nowadays.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Or the RTS glut shortly after C&C and Warcraft?
Hey now, Warcraft 2 was pretty good...
That is ironic, wow. Quake was revolutionary, in that it moved away from pixel/raster rendering to polygons, but it's lineage came directly from real, fun games too. That's why Quake pioneered such new gaming techniques such as rocket jumping, fragging and infatuation with zombies :)
Full disclosure: I spent a few hours last night paying Death Rally, and wish I was at home now so I can play more!