Indycar Racing 2 was a good game, back in 1995; in some ways, it was the Crysis of the Clinton years, in that most mortals could not run it to its full potential when it was new. Still, that potential was surely fairly limited, as we’re talking about a DOS game from 30 years ago. Sure, it was limited– but limits are meant to be broken, and games are made to be modded. [TedMeat] has made a video showing the updates. (Embedded below.)
It turns out there was a 3D-accelerated version sold with the short-lived Rendition graphics cards. That version is what let the community upscale everything to the absurd resolutions our modern monitors are capable of. Goodbye SVGA, hello HD. Specifically, [sharangad] has created a wrapper to translate the Rendition API to modern hardware. It doesn’t sound like higher-res textures have been modded in, in which case this looks spectacular for graphics designed in 1995. It’s not the latest Forza, but for what it is, it impresses.
The second hack [TedMeat] discusses is a mod by [GPLaps] that pulls physics values from game memory to throw to a modern force-feedback wheel, and it shows just how good the physics was in 1995. You really can feel what’s going on– stopping a skid before it starts, for example. That’s normal these days, but for the kids playing with a keyboard in 1995, it would have been totally mind-blowing.
As tipster [Keith Olson] put it: “What can I say? Fans gonna fan!” — and we’re just as grateful for that fact as we are for the tipoff. If you’re in a fandom that’s hacked its way to keep old favourites alive, we’d love to hear about it: submit a tip.
I was one of the beta testers for this game and NASCAR Racing 2 (and up) for Papyrus. Both games were way ahead of their time as far as physics go and the Rendition cards weren’t quite as good as the VooDoo cards but had the advantage of not having to have 2 video cards like the first VooDoo cards.
iRacing still uses some of the original Papyrus tech and was founded by a couple of Papyrus developers after Papyrus went out of business after EA snatched the naming rights to NASCAR and Indycar from them in 2004 and turned it into a kiddie arcade racers instead of a serious sim. I haven’t bought a single EA game since.
I had the NASCAR game from Papyrus and remembered it fondly. I saw this YT video come up in my own recommends a week or so ago and even though I didn’t play the indy car game, it immediately brought back memories.
That was the disadvantage, actually. Voodoo cards were 3D accelerators only, so all the chip resources were reserved for that. You have to mind that the early 3D accelerators were not re-programmable parallel processing cores. They implemented OpenGL (or other) library functions as fixed pipelines in the chip. You could not dynamically allocate resources from 2D rendering to 3D rendering by switching what the GPU was doing – having both meant having twice as much GPU on the board – equivalent to having two video cards mashed into one. If you were building it to a cost, a compromise had to be made on how much acceleration you can afford to add. Some of the library functions might still be running in software while others were accelerated by the card, which gave limited performance.
The other trick was SLI which meant two Voodoo cards could render alternate lines of the screen in turns, doubling the size of your frame buffer for higher resolutions.
The voodoo2 was such a beast. If you buy a PC today it will generally play modern games; dropping a $400 video card in your PC just lets you run a higher resolution. Adding a Voodoo2 to my Pentium 2 machine opened up whole new genres of games that wouldn’t boot on the OEM ATI Rage card. I was 14 years old and it took me all year to save up the cash. To this day, I’ve never made another hardware purchase with so much bang for the buck.
I dearly wish that Voodoo had survived into the modern era.
They were the 27 liter Merlin engine in a race car on a Formula 1 track. Once the paradigm shifted towards general parallel processing GPUs where the algorithmic tricks and resource allocation are defined in software rather than hardware (i.e. shader programs), their technology became obsolete.
The first video card that came out with support for programmable shaders was the GeForce 3, three years after Voodoo 2. They tried to make a “scalable architecture” with the Voodoo 5 series, but that was just throwing more GPUs on the same board to brute-force more performance out of it. Their technology stopped progressing at DirectX 6.0 and became obsolete with Direct3D 8.0 in 2000.
It’s also funny how, when we were young, the time that we got to play around with technology like the Voodoo series cards felt like decades. In absolute terms, it was a flash in the pan.
These companies and products were basically booted up from nothing in the span of a few months, sold for 2-3 years, and then vanished into thin air as the technology converged into something else.
Consider, only 1-2 million Voodoo 2 cards could have possibly been sold during the lifespan of the product. That’s a really small number considering how many computers there were. To have seen and used one is itself pretty lucky.
Papyrus made great games, even if you didn’t have the fancy graphics hardware and had to run them at like 320×200. I didn’t know about the connection iRacing. Thanks!
It’s not even the only open wheel racing simulator from that era to get the complete makeover treatment. There is also x86GP2 by Hatcher which is a complete Windows re-implementation of Geoff Crammond’s Grand Prix 2 for DOS from 1996 with added features such as dynamic weather. GPLaps has a version of his force feedback app for that as well.
So funny, I had the Intergraph Reactor graphics card. This is one of the few games I remember playing that my graphics card could use 3D accelerated