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@Arenacale That's strange, I haven't seen any such issues. I would expect errors on startup only if you exceed the number of tracks, or maybe you modified or removed LagunaHQ so it can't load the intro. I haven't checked but I would expect the Rendition game to have the same 30 track limit as well - I've added a few custom tracks to the default list and I don't get those errors, except in those cases where the individual track can't load because of reasons that we're investigating.
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I kind of figured it out - the game is expecting, for whatever reason, to expect those specific 20 folders. I copied the guts of Pavel's Mid-Ohio into the game folder, now it works beautifully. More experimentation to do, then.
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I just tried to replicate your issue by removing the MIDOHIO folder and the game still loaded fine. Also looked into the INDYCAR.EXE file and didn't see it referencing those track folder names. Still wondering why you would've had that error previously. Anyway good to see you got the Rendition wrapper working!
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You want ICR2Rend.exe.
That actually solved my problems I was having, using that EXE lets me run new tracks as normal, so I'll be continuing on with that (the copy I grabbed for the Rendition version of the game maybe wasn't the best).. So far I haven't seen too many issues, beyond what's documented here. The garage won't load for add-on tracks, though. Not a big problem yet for me but worth noting at this point.
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@arenacale - I believe the garage not loading happens in those tracks where the track textures don’t leave enough memory for the garage to load its additional textures. There are some custom tracks with fewer or smaller mips that can load the garage. I wish the game would just preload the garage textures on startup but apparently not the case.
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Jonny,
Is this rendition game? This looks like dos version in vga mode, not even svga. And problem is game requires 256 color mode.
In dosbox config file check strings output=ddraw in [sdl] section and machine=vga in [dosbox] section.
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08-15-2024, 04:17 AM
(This post was last modified: 08-15-2024, 05:06 AM by checkpoint10.)
I had a track that didn't load and then I switched over to the 4BIT95 carset and then the track loaded. Similarly, with that 4BIT95 carset, my downtown Detroit track was able to access the garage, whereas with the normal carset, I couldn't go into the garage.
Looking into that carset more, it uses .MI4 images instead of .MIP - when I open an .MI4 in WinMip, I saw that they are 16-color images with each .MI4 having its own unique palette. Was surprised to see that most cars still looked okay with only 16 colors and it's hard to tell in the game.
I haven't tried this, but I am now wondering if I can use .MI4 images in tracks, in order to further save memory. The other thing I don't know is - can I use colors outside of the ones in SUNNY.PCX in .MI4 images?
On a related note, I still need to look into .M16 images. They export to an RGB bitmap and seem to have no palette - for example the SKYINDEX.M16 from ELKHQ has 394 colors. I am not sure if they are somehow more or less efficient in memory usage.
EDIT: I replaced a .MIP in Detroit with an .MI4 and it seems to work. The game will look for the .MI4 if a .MIP is not present. I assume it would look for .M16 as well. Using an .MI4 got me about 50% file size reduction compared to a regular .MIP, with barely noticeable degradation in image quality.
![[Image: zzz-edit-20240811021007.jpeg?rnd=8221634024917714]](https://420b5c9717.cbaul-cdnwnd.com/d3197393f3efa48e6ebc3857598f1c4c/200038650-0840008403/zzz-edit-20240811021007.jpeg?rnd=8221634024917714)