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Thanks for all the info guys. I'll have to try Galaxy 5000. RC Pro-Am and RC Pro-Am 2 are two of my all time favorites, especially 2 (although I've never gotten to play it with a FourScore or a Satellite).

Actually, you know something? There was a raycasting demo for the NES not too terribly long ago. I think you could get something close to Mode 7 by using some simple raycasting. Just, instead of rendering walls (columns of pixels in front of you), you render stuff on the ground (dots on the ground where the "wall" would meet the ground).

The only other idea I had was to do some scanline trickery to exploit the fact that each scanline will have at least 1 section of road on it (if you trace from left to right, you can find a point where the road begins and the road ends). Keep a "table" of road lengths in the nametable, and it'd be somewhat doable.

This is all just theoretical though.

Actually, you know something? There was a raycasting demo for the NES not too terribly long ago. I think you could get something close to Mode 7 by using some simple raycasting.

My, my, my...

Mode 7 is allow to do matrix transformation on a 2D surface to allow it to look like 3D, but it remains a flat surface you're walking/driving on.

Raycasting comutes vectors and make it look more like 3D.

The "ideal" would be a mode 7 ground and with a second layer of raycased graphics on the top of that, but the SNES isn't really capable to do that (in hardware, if you render everything in software it might become possible).

Bregalad wrote:Mode 7 is allow to do matrix transformation on a 2D surface to allow it to look like 3D, but it remains a flat surface you're walking/driving on.

Raycasting comutes vectors and make it look more like 3D.

Unless I'm wrong, the registers of the matrix transformation are updated on every scanline to give the impression of a 3d plane.

What I just mentioned of course isn't actual mode 7 (it'd just produce an effect similar to what you can produce with mode 7), but with this raycasting idea, you'd at least be able to face a direction that's perpendicular to the road. You can't do that with a simple scanline-warped road.

Though, the scanline method I mentioned was based off of my own observations from watching Virtua Racer. Of course, if you have two roads visibly parallel to each other, you'd only be able to "see" the one you're on. You'd see any sharp turns though.

Tokumaru did the raycaster Forum Link. Check it out, it's damned impressive.

That said you still are not going to get Mario-Kart style graphics.

It seems like you could use the Rad Racer / Rad Racer II display tricks to accomplish a similar game style. It would not be free-roaming like Mario Kart is, but you could at least do a first-person kart racer with power ups and weapons and such.

I was just looking at impressive old games on a different forum and someone posted this video of Toy Story Racer for GBC.

I don't think it's actually rendering anything in 3D, rather it looks like they're playing a highly simplified and compressed full motion video in the background and drawing sprites on top of it.

Would the NES have enough memory to do something like this, even one short track? To me it's more impressive than Rad Racer's trickery or even SNES's Mode 7.

Toy Story Racing for GBC is 2MB large. It is not that impressive or interesting as it could seem by first look, actually - it reuses sections of the track animation over and over again, it has some compression artifacts and low framerate.

The same technology was used in Mega Race, and it wasn't very playable too. Mega Race 2 was much better, though, but it used polygonal cars, color lighting, and pixel-resolution Z-buffer, which is very important - major limitation of this technology that without the Z-buffer you have to always put your cars above all the obstacles, which is not always possible, and that's doesn't look good (you can see that in Toy Story). First Mega Race solved that problem easily - just one opponent car at a time, and he always stay close to player and far from the road sides.

There's a tech demo of a Stunt Race FX clone for the Gameboy made by some guy that's pretty impressive. The Youtube video has been removed, but you can find the ROM by googling for "gameboy stunt race" (it's PD afaik).