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Lou's Pseudo 3d Page

extentofthejam.com

11–20 of 28 posts

Re: Lou's Pseudo 3d Page

#11
post #6

Ah, this brings back memories. Arcade racing games were my favorite as a kid. High poly models and realistic lighting in the living room will never be as exciting as speakers right behind your head, real steering wheel and pedals bolted to something heavy, and your friends talking shit from the multiplayer linked machines. Plus the background chaos sounds of all the other games in the arcade, token machines, people y…

Dave and Busters has plenty of multiplayer racing games. I wouldn't be surprised if Chuck E Cheese does as well.

Re: Lou's Pseudo 3d Page

#12
post #3

If you like this article you might be interested in this article about the mode7 on the GBA: http://www.coranac.com/tonc/text/mode7.htm Personally I love this kind of old-school programming article. It reminds me when I was developing homebrew games for the GBA!

GBA programming was used in my school's class that covered (among other things) introductory C. It's really fun and pretty simple for beginners to write for bitmap mode.

Re: Lou's Pseudo 3d Page

#13
post #12
post #3

If you like this article you might be interested in this article about the mode7 on the GBA: http://www.coranac.com/tonc/text/mode7.htm Personally I love this kind of old-school programming article. It reminds me when I was developing homebrew games for the GBA!

GBA programming was used in my school's class that covered (among other things) introductory C. It's really fun and pretty simple for beginners to write for bitmap mode.

That's exactly how I started programming! It was indeed a lot of fun. I remember being blown away the first time I saw a game/demo I wrote run on the real hardware. It was so rewarding. It's nice to see teachers using GBA programming as an introduction. It's so much more fascinating for a beginner in comparison to a regular "Hello World" written in a terminal or a basic sorting algorithm in C.

Re: Lou's Pseudo 3d Page

#14
Awesome!

I remember when I first saw SEGA's Virtua Racer in the arcades back in the early/mid 1990s. It was the first impressive true polygon-based racing game I played:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3PcHBFsjxg

The other polygon-based racing game that was impressive, but it hard pretty horrible controls and not as beautiful, was Hard Drivin':

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6JC-HCNcio

The cool thing about Hard Drivin' is you could go anywhere and do anything, where as with Virtua Racing you had to follow the track.

Re: Lou's Pseudo 3d Page

#15
The most interesting thing to me was the bit about dedicated road hardware(!). That just sounds so awesome. I imagine someone inveting that or implementing it.

I used to have a ZX Spectrum clone and still remember liking Chase HQ racing game. This was late '80s, on a 3MHz, 48K machine and they had road barriers and tumbleweeds that you'd bump and they'd bounce off. It was a stupid detail but it really stuck with me as it being a fancy feature.

Here is someone playing it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjrbcLm78I8

Re: Lou's Pseudo 3d Page

#17
post #15

The most interesting thing to me was the bit about dedicated road hardware(!). That just sounds so awesome. I imagine someone inveting that or implementing it. I used to have a ZX Spectrum clone and still remember liking Chase HQ racing game. This was late '80s, on a 3MHz, 48K machine and they had road barriers and tumbleweeds that you'd bump and they'd bounce off. It was a stupid detail but it really stuck with me a…

I was an avid Spectrum user and I remember this game very well, mostly because I could not get my hands on it in South Africa. Chase HQ was praised to high heavens when it was released on the ZX Spectrum. For a long time, this was THE game to get on the machine. That and Rainbow Islands.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chase_H.Q.#Ports_and_related_re...

I still have this copy of SU laying around somewhere where they reviewed the game:

http://www.worldofspectrum.org/showmag.cgi?mag=SinclairUser/...

Re: Lou's Pseudo 3d Page

#18

Awesome! I remember when I first saw SEGA's Virtua Racer in the arcades back in the early/mid 1990s. It was the first impressive true polygon-based racing game I played: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3PcHBFsjxg The other polygon-based racing game that was impressive, but it hard pretty horrible controls and not as beautiful, was Hard Drivin': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6JC-HCNcio The cool thing about Hard Dr…

Searching about Hard Drivin' had me looking at very first CGI companies (III) and reminded me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Fredkin#WarGames and then http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing

Surprising.

Re: Lou's Pseudo 3d Page

#19

This kind of thing is why I got interested in programming in the first place. Pseudo-3D racing games in particular... as a kid, it was boggling to me how these simple 2D machines could produce a pretty convincing pseudo-3D racetrack! The Atari 2600 could hardly handle drawing the ghosts in Pac-Man; how could it draw a decent "3D" roadway? Bizarrely, I lost interest in that kind of programming once machines got so pow…

> I lost interest in that kind of programming once machines got so powerful that drawing this kind of thing became easy.

Me, too. Once libraries and APIs become commonplace, programming became much more about connecting known working objects together rather than understanding multiple topics in depth.

Just before the internet took off, around 1998 or so, I spent months and months learning what every byte in .jpg, .gif, .mid and .wav files did. That really itched the scratching in my brain. I would love to find a new skill or hobby that affects me like that. Making pictures with ImageMagick just doesn't interest me... I'm actually finding woodworking to be somewhat as engrossing, but the difference is that in woodworking, you constantly see steady progress toward a goal, whereas in computers, a picture or sound would spring to life instantly once you'd cracked the code. You really felt the jump.

Oh well.

Re: Lou's Pseudo 3d Page

#20

Awesome! I remember when I first saw SEGA's Virtua Racer in the arcades back in the early/mid 1990s. It was the first impressive true polygon-based racing game I played: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3PcHBFsjxg The other polygon-based racing game that was impressive, but it hard pretty horrible controls and not as beautiful, was Hard Drivin': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6JC-HCNcio The cool thing about Hard Dr…

man, the sensation of speed in Virtua Racing is WICKED FAST.
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