Rendition card

[samsepi0l]

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.

As I am reading this I keep thinking to myself "how does he always continue to discover this brilliant stuff???!!!???"

Now I wonder- can we "bend" the rules a little with the regular version of the game to use other colors and do new things.

I like it when you are working on new tracks (because we get new tracks  ) but I like it when you are discovering new things also (because I can do new things with my tracks  ) LOL

[checkpoint10]

I think all of this was known back in the 1990s... after all, we got WinMip which can handle all of these file formats! It's more like unearthing "lost" knowledge.

The .MI4 format is interesting to me, despite seeming like a limitation, it's basically allowing us to have a unique palette for every image which can give us way more colors than the SUNNY.PCX. And it has the upside of taking up less space. Seems like another powerful tool we have at our disposal.

[Pavel 69]

MI4 format is used almost everywhere in original tracks for Grand Prix Legends. It's called Mip type 0 there but structure is the same: it's a texture with individual 16 colors palette. And GPL was design to run with rendition cards. So maybe this is the reson MI4 files are there everywhere.

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?

I'm sure Rendition game doesn't use 256 colors mode as base. Because m16 mip then will not display correctly. And game converts all textures to 16 bit. So there is no need to make mi4 files use only colors from sunny.pcx

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.

16 colors are usually enogh for small texture. In GPL such textures are usuall small. So one simple building can use several textures cover shadow side and bright side. But in ICR2 and N99/N3 textures are usually big with many details on them. And I'm afraid 16 colors will not be enought. So I think not all textures should be relaced with mi4 but only simple one.

[checkpoint10]

Thank you Pavel, great information! Now I wonder if ICR2 Rendition will accept a high number of small .MI4 files. The more I am working on Detroit, the more it seems that there is no magic number of .MIP files support - when I keep creating those 256x256 files, it takes me to the limit very quickly.

[sharangad]

[EDIT]
@checkpoint10, I think the texture size limit comes from the game binary itself, not so much the Rendition card. There're games which use more than 4 MB of textures (vhexen2) but it only loads textures for things that are visible, replacing them in video RAM. ICR2 is the same, it's constantly paging textures in.

Internal structures in the game (system RAM) might not support going beyond certain limits. Hacking the game is the best option. I'm not very good at it, unfortunately and @Raven-05 on Vogons who hacked a lot of Rendition Windows games (rredline) isn't too great with dos.
[/EDIT[

[sharangad]

ufffffff....................!

@JohnyO,

The game binary needs to be called indycar.exe or cart.exe (which I believe are the original names). When dosbox/rready detects it as ICR2 it selects an internal rendering profile that the game needs. RReady's emulation isn't 100% at the moment; translating some behaviours into OpenGL is problematic, so they're dealt with game by game.

[EDIT] The game runs at 640x480/16 bit (64K colours) internally. RReady renders it at 32 bit RGBA8888 so effects like fog and specular highlights (not used by DOS games) have full colour resolution.

[sharangad]

One other thing, the cars95-2k carset does run at a full framerate, if you set [cpu] cycles=400000 in dosbox-rendition.conf. The menus are full speed as well.

You'll need a beefy cpu for it though. This emulates a 400 MHz Pentium 3.

You can access the conf file by clicking "dosbox-rendition settings" in the DOS apps tab of rlauncher. Make sure you highlight the right version of dosbox before clicking (dosbox-staging is slower for icr2 than dosbox-rendition, unlike vquake 1 for which staging is faster)).

[sharangad]

One other thing, for best performance DMA should be turned on by running indycar.exe or cart.exe like this (i.e. from a batch file) :
cd cr (or whatever folder the game is installed to)
set SPEEDY3D=
set SPEEDY3D_DMA=1
set SPEEDY3D_MEMSIZE=8
cart.exe (or indycar.exe)

Alternatively you could run cartfast.bat or indyfast.bat (supplied with the game installation).

Running cartrend.bat or indyrend.bat will run the game in FIFO mode.

DMA mode performs better, but Dosbox/RReady *might* have stability issues on some systems or under some conditions. If you do encounter this, set threadsafe=true in the [rendition] section of %localappdata%\dosbox-rendition.conf (accessed by clicking dosbox settings from the DOS tab in RLauncher. Make sure dosbox is highlighted and not dosbox-staging before clicking). Dosbox-staging (only vanilla dosbox) doesn't fully support this setting, so for ICR2 stick to Dosbox and not staging. FIFO mode should have rock solid stability for ICR2, but is slower than DMA mode.

You'll need an install of the Rendition specific version of the game from the DOS\REND subfolder on the CD (for cart racing II. Don't know what folder the IndyCar folder is in. I would guess it would be in the same folder (but you will need a copy of ICR2 which actually has Rendition support).

I don't recommend running the regular (DOS software rendered) version of the game with the Rendition version indycar.exe or cart.exe. At best you'll end up with graphical corruption.

Once again, the game binary in its installation folder needs to be cart.exe or indycar.exe or you'll end up with graphical corruption.

[sharangad]

Another video: ICR2 (Australia + Detroit Downtown HQ):
https://youtu.be/QF89PTjRW48

There isn't much to see except that all HUD issues have been fixed. There shouldn't be any stray lines or pixels anywhere in the cockpit view.

This isn't available on the store yet but should be within the next two weeks, barring any unforeseen problems.

[sharangad]

Version 1.0.24 of RReady should be out in a couple of hours. This should fix the stray line of pixels that appears inside the cockpit.

I've open source the DOS component of RReady, so mainline dosbox-staging will incorporate it at some point. The store based version will still be sold for anyone who wants to support the project.

[EDIT]I supplied the wrong help file with the store build. Clicking help button in RLauncher will open a PDF document without a table of contents. This should have it:
https://nirvtek.com/downloads/RReady%20R...rapper.pdf[/EDIT]

[EDIT2] To update the the actual dosbox.exe (or staging) that's run, you'll need to run RLauncher and from the Dos tab run Dosbox or Dosbox Staging. If you use both, you'll have to do it for each one. Dosbox and staging as well as the Windows apps were designed to be run from RLauncher always. RLauncher will remember tabs and the last selected item for each tab in the *NEXT* update.