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.'"

Comments

Aw gee shucks well howdy doncha know.

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

This game was created by members of Future Crew

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Slashdotted to hell

[buchner.johannes]

Original specs: ...
                * 60-plus MHz CPU
                * 8MB RAM

New specs: ...
                * 1-plus GHz CPU(s)
                * 1-plus GB RAM

why?

Selling computers, perhaps?

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Selling computers, perhaps?

[kiddygrinder]

hey, if you think you can do better maybe you should have had a crack at it? also you may have noticed that he was paying more respect to the code than trying to get the thing to go as fast as possible, so indirectly he was doing exactly what you want :)

Re:How I Got the First Post

[demonlapin]

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.

Re:How I Got the First Post

[TheJokeExplainer]

It didn't perform good enough under DOSBox.

Re:Future Crew documentary from ASM 2010!

[rsmith-mac]

This is Slashdot: Kdawson will probably post it with a completely screwed up summary in a couple of weeks. (And I really wish I was kidding)