How Death Rally Got Ported 89
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.'"
Slashdotted to hell (Score:5, Informative)
Copy from Google Cache:
Re:Death Track (Score:2, Informative)
Unlike Death Track... Death Rally is actually playable, and isn't rated up for its age and nostalgia filter like that rose-tinted young idiot like many on that site have "reviewed" and putting up broken rips of games that often get DOSBox bug reports because abandonia is a bunch of morons that upload bugged rips. Some "preservation" mission they've got there, if they were serious about that, pristine disk images and complete manual and feelies scans would have been done... but nah, to 'own' a DOS game in their view, means getting a collection torrent. Kids running sites about 80's games = disaster.
So yeah, Death Rally >>>>>>>>>> Death Track.
Still fun (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Cool where is the Linux version? (Score:3, Informative)
works well with wine
Death Rally's Music & Six Degrees of Separatio (Score:5, Informative)
It's time for a game of Six Degrees of Separation: Future Crew Edition
The music's composer was Jonne Valtonen [wikipedia.org], however for any of you familiar with the PC demoscene, you'd probably better recognize him as Purple Motion. In the early-to-mid 90s, Purple Motion was a member of the Future Crew [wikipedia.org], the famous Finnish demo group responsible for the legendary demo Second Reality [wikipedia.org], the same demo on which Purple Motion was the principle musician.
The Future Crew often wrote their own tools; one of those tools was Scream Tracker [wikipedia.org]. Purple Motion didn't write it (he wasn't a coder nor a member of the Future Crew at the time), but it was the tracker software he used for all of the Future Crew demos he worked on. Ultimately he's responsible for a number of the masterpieces written in Scream Tracker.
This brings us to Death Rally. When the Future Crew split up in 1995, the bulk of the members gravitated towards a new company started by former Future Crew members: Remedy Entertainment. Remedy is of course is the developer of Death Rally and Purple Motion was one of the Future Crew members to move to Remedy.
And thus, this is why the music for Death Rally is written in Scream Tracker 3. Death Rally's music composer came from the group that created Scream Tracker in the first place, and that was the tracker software that he had the bulk of his composing experience with. And while I obviously can't speak for him, I'd imagine he preferred S3M.