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.'"
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).