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

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: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.