6 ms·

I'd swear blind that game was cursed. Almost every 8-bit conversion (including the C64 version), and some of the 16-bit versions were terrible. ISTR the Sega M

by iuguy 7y ago

I'd swear blind that game was cursed. Almost every 8-bit conversion (including the C64 version), and some of the 16-bit versions were terrible. ISTR the Sega Master System version being the most playable.

Flow 7y ago
Most racing games were horrible on the 8-bit computers. Even on the Amiga there were few actually good racing games. Lotus Esprit Challenge and Stunt Car Racer(God bless) was among the good ones.
- philpem 7y ago
  E-Type on the Acorn Archimedes was pretty good. Unashamedly an OutRun clone, but with a Jaguar E-Type instead of a Ferrari. One of the most amusing parts of the game was the animation you got when you drove into something. The driver and passenger would 'jump' out of the car in a fairly amusing manner! (at least to primary-school age me)
  - axilmar 7y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E82pl8rEOoY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E82pl8rEOoY Not really on par with Outrun though.
    - philpem 7y ago
      I'll give you that. But to a kid playing it on lunch breaks, on the computers we used to do our school work? :) It's also a hell of a lot easier to play with a Voltmace Delta mouseport joystick (and you can say the same for ArcElite!). It may have had keyboard keys, but I'd need to look that up.
  - radiowave 7y ago
    Of course, you're describing a 32 bit ARM system here. No surprise it outclasses it's 8 bit predecessors.
- Razengan 7y ago
  Hey, Buggy Boy on the Commodore 64 was amazing.
- renaudg 7y ago
  Chase HQ, Wec Le Mans and the Crazy Cars series were excellent on the Amstrad CPC. There’s an upcoming homebrew title named Vespertino which looks like what the Outrun conversion should have been.
- buckminster 7y ago
  That's true, but Revs was awesome. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revs_(video_game) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revs_(video_game)
axilmar 7y ago
How would it be possible for 8-bit machines to successfully emulate a game that used twin 68000 cpus and custom sprite scaling hardware? these conversions were just a marketing gimmick, targeting the wallets of the poor consumers. It was amazing back then to me how bad were home computers relative to arcade machines back then. It was also amazing to me that no home computer manufacturer ever had a plan for a serious gaming home computer system that matched (or came close to) the arcades in visual quality. Who wouldn't try to buy a machine that could play, for example, Outrun, close to the arcade? even if it cost 1000 dollars...
- BurningCycles 7y ago
  >It was also amazing to me that no home computer manufacturer ever had a plan for a serious gaming home computer system that matched (or came close to) the arcades in visual quality. Actually the X86000 from Sharp was pretty much this. It had perfect ports of arcade games and was also used as the development system by Capcom among other arcade companies.
  - axilmar 7y ago
    Here is a funny story: I live in Athens, Greece. In 1987 (or it was later?), I read on the ACE magazine about the Sharp X68000...with magazine at hand, I went down to the local Sharp dealer to see if they will import the machine...they didn't know anything about it! when I showed them the magazine, they didn't believe me and they refused to pick up the phone and phone Japan!!! The Sharp X68000 was a beast of machine, but it didn't have sprite scaling.
- vidarh 7y ago
  > It was amazing back then to me how bad were home computers relative to arcade machines back then. It was also amazing to me that no home computer manufacturer ever had a plan for a serious gaming home computer system that matched (or came close to) the arcades in visual quality. The Amiga did come close-ish, but despite its custom chips, the lack of a custom sprite scaler and too low memory bandwidth would have likely made it impossible to get all that much closer (it's mainly lacking extra details next to the road). The dual 68k's on Outrun also ran on 12.5Mhz vs. ~8Mhz/7.16Mhz (depending on NTSC vs. PAL) for the Amiga's single M68k. Outrun on Amiga: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOGxxYm4z5I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOGxxYm4z5I Outrun on arcade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7tZFW4WedI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7tZFW4WedI > Who wouldn't try to buy a machine that could play, for example, Outrun, close to the arcade? even if it cost 1000 dollars... In effect the Amiga was the closest the market would bear - Commodore struggled on for years, and sold about 5m Amiga's, and the only reason they survived as long as they did was that Commodore were masters at cost-cutting (arguably that also sank them: they cut their R&D budgets to the bone, among many other mistakes). People who went from working at Apple to Commodore at the time have indicated that attempts at Apple to figure out how Commodore was able to sell the Amiga at the price-points they did for example massively over-estimated Commodores manufacturing costs and could not figure out how Commodore were able to squeeze out a margin at all. As such we can assume the Amiga price, which including a monitor, joysticks etc. around the time of Outrun would easily ended up in the region of 1000 dollars or more, was the high point of what was commercially possible around the thousand dollar mark at the time.

by iuguy 7y ago

Flow 7y ago

Most racing games were horrible on the 8-bit computers. Even on the Amiga there were few actually good racing games. Lotus Esprit Challenge and Stunt Car Racer(God bless) was among the good ones.

philpem 7y ago
E-Type on the Acorn Archimedes was pretty good. Unashamedly an OutRun clone, but with a Jaguar E-Type instead of a Ferrari. One of the most amusing parts of the game was the animation you got when you drove into something. The driver and passenger would 'jump' out of the car in a fairly amusing manner! (at least to primary-school age me)
- axilmar 7y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E82pl8rEOoY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E82pl8rEOoY Not really on par with Outrun though.
  - philpem 7y ago
    I'll give you that. But to a kid playing it on lunch breaks, on the computers we used to do our school work? :) It's also a hell of a lot easier to play with a Voltmace Delta mouseport joystick (and you can say the same for ArcElite!). It may have had keyboard keys, but I'd need to look that up.
- radiowave 7y ago
  Of course, you're describing a 32 bit ARM system here. No surprise it outclasses it's 8 bit predecessors.
Razengan 7y ago
Hey, Buggy Boy on the Commodore 64 was amazing.
renaudg 7y ago
Chase HQ, Wec Le Mans and the Crazy Cars series were excellent on the Amstrad CPC. There’s an upcoming homebrew title named Vespertino which looks like what the Outrun conversion should have been.
buckminster 7y ago
That's true, but Revs was awesome. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revs_(video_game) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revs_(video_game)

axilmar 7y ago

How would it be possible for 8-bit machines to successfully emulate a game that used twin 68000 cpus and custom sprite scaling hardware? these conversions were just a marketing gimmick, targeting the wallets of the poor consumers. It was amazing back then to me how bad were home computers relative to arcade machines back then. It was also amazing to me that no home computer manufacturer ever had a plan for a serious gaming home computer system that matched (or came close to) the arcades in visual quality. Who wouldn't try to buy a machine that could play, for example, Outrun, close to the arcade? even if it cost 1000 dollars...

BurningCycles 7y ago
>It was also amazing to me that no home computer manufacturer ever had a plan for a serious gaming home computer system that matched (or came close to) the arcades in visual quality. Actually the X86000 from Sharp was pretty much this. It had perfect ports of arcade games and was also used as the development system by Capcom among other arcade companies.
- axilmar 7y ago
  Here is a funny story: I live in Athens, Greece. In 1987 (or it was later?), I read on the ACE magazine about the Sharp X68000...with magazine at hand, I went down to the local Sharp dealer to see if they will import the machine...they didn't know anything about it! when I showed them the magazine, they didn't believe me and they refused to pick up the phone and phone Japan!!! The Sharp X68000 was a beast of machine, but it didn't have sprite scaling.
vidarh 7y ago
> It was amazing back then to me how bad were home computers relative to arcade machines back then. It was also amazing to me that no home computer manufacturer ever had a plan for a serious gaming home computer system that matched (or came close to) the arcades in visual quality. The Amiga did come close-ish, but despite its custom chips, the lack of a custom sprite scaler and too low memory bandwidth would have likely made it impossible to get all that much closer (it's mainly lacking extra details next to the road). The dual 68k's on Outrun also ran on 12.5Mhz vs. ~8Mhz/7.16Mhz (depending on NTSC vs. PAL) for the Amiga's single M68k. Outrun on Amiga: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOGxxYm4z5I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOGxxYm4z5I Outrun on arcade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7tZFW4WedI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7tZFW4WedI > Who wouldn't try to buy a machine that could play, for example, Outrun, close to the arcade? even if it cost 1000 dollars... In effect the Amiga was the closest the market would bear - Commodore struggled on for years, and sold about 5m Amiga's, and the only reason they survived as long as they did was that Commodore were masters at cost-cutting (arguably that also sank them: they cut their R&D budgets to the bone, among many other mistakes). People who went from working at Apple to Commodore at the time have indicated that attempts at Apple to figure out how Commodore was able to sell the Amiga at the price-points they did for example massively over-estimated Commodores manufacturing costs and could not figure out how Commodore were able to squeeze out a margin at all. As such we can assume the Amiga price, which including a monitor, joysticks etc. around the time of Outrun would easily ended up in the region of 1000 dollars or more, was the high point of what was commercially possible around the thousand dollar mark at the time.