Hello everyone

I'm trying to port to the CMM2 the great arcade game Outrun. It will be a challenge to make it run with good performance, this means, I will have a lot of fun

I can't promise that the port will be similar to the arcade version. I will try my best to keep it closest as possible to the original.

The following screenshot is the result of 300 lines of basic code from this weekend. The source code is not available in my git hub yet. I need to progress a little more before pushing it to its git repo.


Edited 2025-11-17 16:19 by LeoNicolas

Nice,

I played it last weekend on one of the earlier arcades.
Is KM on pico stopped ? Or is it waiting for Peter to push the use of libraries to blit from ?

Volhout

  Quote  

Or is it waiting for Peter to push the use of libraries to blit from ?

That is all there in RC14. I was hoping you would give it a good testing

@Peter,

Is there is preferred method to get the X and Y dimensions in the library (2 words) before the image data ?

I know the method Petscii uses (the CSUB) but lets assume we have a BMP in RGB121 format on disk. And we know the dimensions.

How would you do it ? Use the Petscii method ? And that with the 1 file, in stead of the individual sprites. There is a limit in what you can do, because the MMbasic program needs to hold the sprite data in readable form, as well as the CSUB conversion in RAM. That is why we had to split the Petscii sprites in 70kbyte blocks.

And since we do not store individual indexes (the whole BMP) we cannot compress. I have no clear view how this could work with a 80k+ sized BMP.

The way I see is that I open the BMP file in a HEX editor, move the data down by 2 words of 64 bits, and type the X and Y values in as integers. Then save the file.

Is that what you envision ?

Volhout

It does it for you. The blit then knows the dimensions of the image in the flash slot. All you have to know is the locations of your sprites in your image. The dimensions of the image in the flash slot can be completely different from the display. Just load the bmp and blit your known image locations
Edited 2025-11-17 20:03 by matherp

Eeeaassy !!

I'll test it when home tonight.

Volhout

Nice  

/Peter63

I tried my hand at these pseudo 3D car racing games, a far cry from Outrun. That's when I came across this on the subject of Outrun...
https://www.youtube.com/@reassembler68k
He also programmed a track editor for it... just incredible background knowledge.
I gave up in frustration.  
Good luck!

Matthias

I pushed the Outrun's code to my github. It is far for be playable. For now, the code is only rendering the images to the screen and projecting the road to a pseudo 3D plane.

In my last commit I replaced the sprite write command by pure blit. It looks way faster then before. My goal is making the game to run at 30 FPS. I really don't know if it is possible. Let's see.

https://github.com/leonicolas/outrun-cmm2

I'm following along with great excitement. Good luck!

Hi Leo
I use the same version of MMB4W as you 5.07.03b25, but strangely enough, the road is only displayed occasionally. Do you have any idea why that might be?

Hi Martin

It is a bug in the MMB4W, see MMB4W: Framebuffer creation wiping out my global array

While the game does not have an exit key, to run the game, you need to:

1) First run: run"outrun"
2) Next runs: framebuffer close:run"outrun"

  LeoNicolas said  

1) First run: run"outrun"
2) Next runs: framebuffer close:run"outrun"

Thanks, that worked.
It looks very close to the original. Do you really want to scale the sprites in the game in real time? I imagine that would be computationally intensive.
Cheers
 Martin

No, I will not. I will pre-render them in different sizes. There are a lot of challenges to overcome, while I'm trying to keep the frame rate in a descent range.

This weekend I am implementing the code to move the camera. I will post a video as soon as it is working

This is going to be challenging! In addition to low fps, there are also display issues on the cmm2.

Yep, it will. But for now, I'm not so concerned about running it on the CMM2. I can use a lot of tricks to improve performance, including reducing the resolution and maybe using CSUBs.

It will be fun

I was looking for a possible color scheme for the Pico.
This was the best result.

Hello Leo,
Here is an example of how the animation of the lines on the road can be done. I used my Pico graphics, but the program is for mmb4w (Only a few lines need to be changed for the Pico.). On the Pico, an animation frame takes about 4 ms to paint, so it is considerably faster under mmb4w.
Take a look at it when you have a chance.
Cheers
Martin
Outrun-Pico.zip

Edited 2025-11-27 23:13 by Martin H.

Thank you Martin

They look great. We can improve a lot the render time reducing the screen resolution and also the size of the sprites we are bliting to the screen.
Edited 2025-11-28 06:28 by LeoNicolas

Of course, reducing the resolution affects speed and memory requirements. In the example, I initially used the full 320 x 240 resolution. The original only has 320 × 224.
Reducing the playing area to, for example, 256 x 192 would save some 25% memory and computing time, but it would also change the appearance. To do this, it would be necessary to reduce all sprites/tiles to 0.8 times their original size in a way that looks believable.
Edited 2025-11-28 19:50 by Martin H.