Pole Position Arcade Port to the Atari ST

[Greyfox]

Yes, that's right, a brand new Homebrew port of the classic Atari / Namco racer : Pole Position will shortly be making it's way to an Atari ST near you and it's around half-complete at the moment. No downloads at the moment, but there's a Youtube video (along with some detail on the history of the project) that you can watch here :

http://youtu.be/UaEdkuAYYC0

This video is a work-in-progress preview of my conversion of the Pole Position arcade coin-op for the Atari ST computer. I always felt it to be a bit of a shame that only the 8-bit machines received (somewhat mediocre) conversions of this classic arcade game and so recently decided to do something about it. If you're familiar with the arcade game, you might recognise the sequence in the video as being the demo mode from the arcade game.

The conversion is based upon my "ppengine" library - a library containing the reverse-engineered logic from the original arcade game. This library is also used in my as-yet-unnamed Pole Position remake for modern computers - which in contrast to this version, runs in fully hardware-accelerated 3D.

The work on this conversion is around half-way complete - I still have a fair bit of work to do in the following areas:

- Sound - there's none yet! If anybody knows about ST sound programming and wants to get on board, I'd be glad of the help.
- Graphics - I haven't implemented all of the billboard types yet, and there's no starting line, gantry or puddles on the track. No car explosions, no clouds in the sky yet, and there's no title screen.
- Performance - you'll be able to see from the video that the frame rate is somewhat lacking - I think it's around 8-10fps for the most part on a standard 8Mhz ST. Most of the graphics code is currently in C, apart from the car and billboard realtime scaling routine which has been written in moderately optimized 68000. I'm not yet sure how much more performance I can gain without either losing graphical quality or doing things that are likely to take forever. If you're familiar with 68000 optimization I'd be glad of a hand in this area.
- Memory optimization - it's currently running on a 1 meg machine only. I hope to have it running on a 520 at some point.

I don't intend to implement a high score table or the spinning "game over" screen on this conversion (neither are particularly interesting things to work on) but I'm hoping that all other sequences from the arcade game will make it over intact.

I'm hoping to release the code as open source once it's finished and I've had a chance to tidy it up. Perhaps somebody might like to convert to the Amiga.

screenies of this beauty

regular updates on his Twitter feed can be found here : https://twitter.com/RetroRacing.

Source: Atari Forums <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/smiley.gif" alt="" title="Smiley" />

p.s. here is his Windows port in production also, I'm soo hot for this port!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7_rbL6dtxs

[zapiy]

I have to say that looks bloody awesome.

[Greyfox]

yeah..it's very impressive, and one of those Games that got ported to every platform and never to the Atari ST or Amiga, yet no body cop'ed it before or attempted a port of this before till now, if this does make it across in perfect form, I'll make sure it gets the Amiga Port treatment, I have friends in high places now..lol...

[TL]

Wow! This is really damn cool!  :63:

[Greyfox]

have a look at the new video I tagged on the bottom..fucking epic!!....

[TL]

I don't like how that new version looks personally 

[TrekMD]

Wow that ST port looks awesome! 

[retromod]

looks great. What kind of library are you using to port them quickly to other platforms? In 1980 I used my own to port games from Amiga to PC and Atari ST and vica versa. 2 Weeks per game to port to C, 1 day for each target system. The Atari ST with 8Mhz outperformed a 80486 in memory copy operation and even the Amiga with blitter was only a few clock cycles faster than the Atari ST.

For sound it is quite easy: directly program the sound chip for engine and brake sound. digitize a sound in .WAV and convert to MOD or format the Atari ST is able to handle directly.

Does the Atari ST version run on monochrome as well?

[Greyfox]

No fella it's not me porting this  .

but thanks, for giving me a big head for a brief period of time lol..I don't actually know who the guy is or have a name for him, but he can be contacted via his you tube channel and @ Atari Forums.

[Greyfox]

Just an update on this port with a new gameplay video

[align=center:1bm0gqtf]www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8_UpVO9qng&feature=youtu.be[/align:1bm0gqtf]

[TL]

Coming along nicely!

Now they need to make the wheels move and add some sound!

[Greyfox]

Yeah, he has allot of work still to do with it, but has openly admitted he is no sound guru and reckons this is going to be his biggest challenge getting good engine sound in here, I think he should just rip one from another game, Continetial Circus comes to mind for it.

[TL]

There are tons of great ST musicians out there, shouldn't really be a problem.

[TrekMD]

That's really looking nice.

[walter_j64bit]

LOL, This Pole Position kicks 7800 butt!