Hardcore A8 coders - thoughts on feasibly of an A8 Mario cart engine :)

[Beeblebrox]

Just throwing this one out there. 

 

I was wondering how feasible people thought a Mario cart style game on the A8 is? 

 

My thinking is this. 

 

What with the excellent international karate RC and RCX games released last year, which utilised amazing multi colour rastaconverter images top half the screen, I wondered about using the same static technique top half of the screen in a Mario kart esque game. 

 

https://youtu.be/in5Ze63DdD4?t=26

 

 

Or alternatively the same upper screen effect/graphics mode as used in the games electraglide (parallax) or cygnis x1 (fixed) :

Ideally a panning and/or parallax scrolling horizon image makes more sense for a track racing game but that has it's limitations when using Rastaconverter images. 

 

For the track and all the players in the lower part of the screen you could use sprite multplexing to get lots of different player colours. Where the sprites inevitably line up horizontally from time to time you'd get flicker, but being a fast racing game that would be a compromise. 

 

DLIs could be used to introduce more colours up the screen, and also a lower display panel for laps, etc. 

 

If course this all depends on the availabile cpu cycles (so perhaps better as a pal based game). Having a cool pokey soundtrack would be great also. 

 

Speed of gameplay is the main thing as it's intended to be a fast paced racing engine. 

 

I am thinking perhaps graphics 10, 9 colour graphics mode could be used for the lower track. 

 

Thinking 128k game, with different track locations ( desert, jungle, snow, city, etc). 

 

You could have some cute player sprite animation, ( @TIX 😉😁) 

 

I've not seen an attempt at a colourful and fast paced Mario cart track racing game on the A8 but it could really be a fun game and showcase title. 

 

All hypothetical. Just interested in people's initial thoughts. 😁🤔😉

 

Edited December 21, 2023 by Beeblebrox

[pirx]

yea, mario kart (or mAYBE ATARI KARt done in cooperation with Atari @Albert) is totally feasible and easier on 8-bitter (and 5200) than on other 8-bit machines thanks to DL. the issue is there are few and far between of us and such a game would require a significant effort to pull off. I'd say 4 people 3 months full-time, so if you'd need to fork ~$4K*4*3 ~~ $50K to have it done by ppl on unpaid vacations from their day jobs. or ~10 man years of hobby creating from time to time.

[Beeblebrox]

@pirx  Heh Heh, I take your point about time, effort. Good to know hypothetically it's doable, even if unlikely it'll ever happen. 😁

Edited December 21, 2023 by Beeblebrox

[Wrathchild]

Prototype of what the UNO/Pico cart can do...

 

[+MrFish]

3 minutes ago, Wrathchild said:

Prototype of what the UNO/Pico cart can do...

Mode 10?

 

[Wrathchild]

6 minutes ago, MrFish said:

Mode 10?

yes, "Mode-7 projection using Mario Kart track tile-map with a reduced palette to give an indication of what it might look like on an Atari 8-bit computer in graphics mode 10."

[Dinadan67]

13 hours ago, Wrathchild said:

Prototype of what the UNO/Pico cart can do...

 

The rendering is done utilising the Raspberry Pi?

[Rybags]

The problem we have - with Pole Position as a prime example, we can do a nice looking track rendering but it involves HScrol/LMS changes on each scanline.

That then makes it somewhat unfriendly towards rendering softsprites.

In theory a rendering engine could do softsprites with offset per line taking those things into consideration but it would cause a fair bit of slowdown.

 

On an unaccelerated machine I think we have to set the sights realistically.  What would be nice is something similar to Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge with multiple detailed opposing cars and terrain that has dips and hills.  But so far we've not really seen anything very impressive.

IMO we're genuinly lacking good FPS perspective racing games that match mid-late 1980s competing systems.

[Paul Westphal]

On 12/21/2023 at 11:17 AM, Wrathchild said:

Prototype of what the UNO/Pico cart can do...

 

Thanks for this post. I knew some folks were using the Uno cart for assistance and this is the first example I have seen. Are there any others?

[Wrathchild]

1 hour ago, Paul Westphal said:

Are there any others?

Playlist on youtube

Edited December 25, 2023 by Wrathchild