exxos wrote: Tue Oct 20, 2026 7:26 pm
Well, Supercars II title music is now totally AI-bastardized, Your welcome
It's impressive that it's generated, but I so fondly remember the original Amiga soundtrack that anything other than that is pure bastardization no matter how good it may be
agranlund wrote: Tue Oct 20, 2026 9:19 pm
It's impressive that it's generated, but I so fondly remember the original Amiga soundtrack that anything other than that is pure bastardization no matter how good it may be
I heard the Amiga version yesterday, I thought WTF is this crap , I like the ST chip one, I think real effort went into it !
exxos wrote: Tue Oct 20, 2026 9:25 pm
I heard the Amiga version yesterday, I thought WTF is this crap , I like the ST chip one, I think real effort went into it !
haha yeah it's amazing what nostaliga can do
Spent so much time playing Supercars2 with friends on the Amiga as a kid.
Remember how "small" the tracks were ? Well not anymore on this POC test
Also with STE hardware scrolling possible, I opted to use a large image held in memory rather than trying to draw tile by tile while scrolling. It was just to slow in the end. Then I started hitting RAM limits and needed a 6MB STE to run the map sizes So had to scale back on a few things so it would load in a 4MB STE
Then came blitter problems as I was trying to use HOG mode, while removing the bottom border.. Things didn't play nicely. Normal blitter mode works but somehow seems to end up being slower overall by 14%. So the "fix" was to only allow blitter operations as long as they dont start on scan line 190 or later.
Anyway, HUGE tracks are now possible and the view area is now technically fullscreen as the display panel is now in the bottom border. This may be a option which can be disabled in the game menu somewhere as some peoples monitors may cut off the bottom border anyway !
Note that this is not running the actual SC2 engine, its a simulated engine which will replace the SC2 engine once its been verified to actually work in the first place !
The track editor had me confused as there's actually different tile sets depending on which track was loaded. I had assumed there was just one huge list of titles which cover all tracks, but seems not! So the editor allows you to choose which tile set you want to work with. It's also possible new title sets could be added in the future !
Also because drawing a actual track could take "forever" by hand, I am adding in a "auto seed" option to take the grunt work out of designing new tracks.
Super Cars II STE remaster: progress and speed-ups
Time for an update on the STE version of Super Cars II. The original game updates the screen once every 3 screen refreshes, which works out at about 17 frames a second. A lot of the recent work has gone into getting the new version to run at a full 50 frames a second, so here is a rundown of what has been done, without going too far down the rabbit hole.
Bigger tracks
The original courses are fairly small. Bagley Marsh, for example, is 640 x 400 pixels.
The new engine has been tested with tracks up to 80 x 112 tiles, which is 1280 x 1792 pixels, roughly nine times the area of Bagley Marsh.
The whole track is held in memory as one big picture, and the STE's hardware scrolling simply moves the view around it. No redrawing the screen as you drive. This is why it needs a 4MB STE.
Full screen of track
The bottom border is opened up and the race panel lives down there, so the track gets the full 200 lines of the normal screen to itself.
Drawing the cars and weapons faster
Everything is drawn with the blitter. The routine was reworked so the blitter is set up once per pass rather than for every sprite, and the CPU does less work per object.
The palette has been reordered so the sprites' colours line up better with the bit planes. A plane that is completely empty or completely filled under a sprite only needs one blitter pass instead of two. With the original colour order the grey computer cars use all 4 bit planes; with the new order they only use 3, so each one takes 7 blitter passes instead of 8. Every pixel is still exactly the same colour as before; I checked every frame of every sprite and the whole track. The colours just got shuffled about a bit, a bit like my shed.
Each blit now only covers the lines and words the sprite actually uses, rather than the full rectangle it sits in. Less copying, same picture.
Cleaning up behind the cars is done by copying the clean track back over only the areas that were drawn on.
Two player mode reworked
The original two player mode is side by side. On the STE the screen is a window onto the whole track, and the hardware scrolling works on whole screen lines, so a side by side split can't use it. It has been reworked to one view on top and one below, changing the video address part way down the screen, so both views are scrolled by hardware with no copying of screen data at all.
Both views look into the same track picture, so each car is only drawn once even if both players can see it.
Both players' panels sit side by side in the bottom border, with red and green lettering so you can tell who is who.
Game logic
The original runs its race logic (the computer cars, collisions, weapons and so on) once every 3 screen refreshes, the same about 17 times a second as its screen updates. That timing is kept exactly as it was, but the work is now spread across those 3 refreshes, so the screen can update at 50fps, about three times as smooth, while the race itself plays out just as it did on the original.
Several of the slowest parts of the original code have been rewritten to be quicker: the car against car checks, the weapon against car checks, the track lookups and the wall checks. The car logic now takes around a fifth less CPU time than the original.
The original also redraws parts of its own panel into its own screen memory, which the new engine never shows, so that work is now skipped.
Every change was tested by running the original game and the new version side by side and comparing every car and every weapon after every game tick. They come out identical, so nothing has been "improved" in the gameplay by accident.
Where it stands
The original game's own race logic is now running inside the new STE engine, in one player and two player split screen.
Normal races hold 50fps in both modes. In a deliberately silly test with every weapon slot in use in two player mode, about 1 frame in 100 still runs over, so weapon and explosion drawing is the next thing to trim.
Still to do: crash and explosion graphics on the cars, jumps, the live panel figures and the sound. There is also a level editor in the works for making new tracks.
Testing so far has been in Hatari and Steem. Real STE testing will come once things settle down.
More when there is more to show. In the meantime, mind the hay bales.
That is great work. I'm looking forward to seeing how smooth it is.
Are you going to keep the SFX the same as the original ST version? Using the YM2149? Then you can use the STe DMA sound to stream your new music (stereo WAV data) from the HDD.
Due to the DMA volume issues in the STe analog audio mixer (which mixes the YM2149 and LMC1992 together) you might need two recordings (normal one and a second one for people like myself who have "fixed" the mixing volumes in HW)
