Fatal Racing / Whiplash S3 ViRGE OEM Release Finally Found & Preserved

[@ctrlaltrees]

Shoutout to the "what's so legendary about the Voodoo cards?" guy from my last video btw

[@cmdrarcturus8197]

At 3:17, some names that stand out: Reise Wagon 2: Robby (most likely Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet) Reise Wagon 1: Gort (certainly the robot from the original The Day the Earth Stood Still) Mission1: Marvin (Either Marvin the Paranoid Android from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or possibly Marvin the Martian) Million 2: BOB (AKA old B.O.B., the old beat-up robot from Disney's The Black Hole) Million 1: VINCENT (the more modern robot from Disney's The Black Hole) Global 2: Voyager (maybe Star Trek: TMP's V'Ger?) Global 1: Nomad (MK-15c space probe from Star Trek: TOS, S02E08, The Changeling)

[@ilikecakeandbiscuits]

This and Carmageddon are my favourite racing games ever. Nothing has captured the feel of driving and the exhilaration of the tracks the same for me. Also the ai competition was believable. I still play it every year on impossible (works well in steam deck!)

[@NK-kh5qs]

The AI of this game still amazes me 30 years later.

[@armorgeddon]

Why - what does the AI do in this game? I even played it very often back then but can't remember while I can remember great AI in Geoff Crammond's Grand Prix simulations.

[@Posesso]

Especially Bob

[@khajiit8221]

Nice vid, loved playing this game back in the day. Still have my original copy bought brand new in 1995 in the UK from a shop called "Game Zone" I think.

[@fungo6631]

4:47 That's because even the VGA 320x200 mode is actually output as 640x400 (actually 320x400) on the video output side. I don't think it's upscaled even, but simply that the 320x240 mode uses line doubling to get the 31 KHz horizontal refresh.

[@djTASS]

5:25 - What a trip down memory lane! I am 32 years old and I still love this game! I remember you had to switch your camera view to the first person while driving through those "corkscrews" to be able to drive through them.

[@ctrlaltrees]

Yes! Those corkscrews are impossible! 😆

[@theonlymoo5e]

@@ctrlaltreesNot if you were going top speed. LOL I wish there was a version remastered for Windows 7 & higher LOL

[@jtsiomb]

Nah, the trick was following the outside of the corkscrew, and they turn out to be consistently easy even in 3rd person view. Just keep following the outside curb.

[@MrDreamer60]

​@@jtsiombi always thought it was random!

[@armorgeddon]

@@jtsiomb Exactly and with a steering wheel or probably other analog controllers too, it was very easy. Once I switched from using the keyboard to a Thrustmaster T2 steering wheel I destroyed all my previous lap records by many seconds instantly.

[@RetrogradeScene]

Great job at documenting it all!!

[@RinoaL]

Now that I have one of these cards on a 233mhz system as well so this has become extremely useful to me.

[@weepingscorpion8739]

Man, I love Fatal Racing so much. I used to play it with a mate so many times all three cups, and when he moved, I started playing the game with my sister and spent even more hours, days, weeks, months playing it. Always on Impossible too and always on Championship mode. However, I don't remember it being that choppy on my 100 MHz Pentium 1 with 32 MB of RAM and an S3 card (I think it was a Trio though). Also, I did have a Voodoo 1 installed in that machine but I do remember not liking the high resolution version so I always played the low resolution version. Yeah, a bit weird I suppose. Still, I love this game, and I'd love to set up a DOS machine for streaming this game, maybe even playing through the full game with my sister in split screen mode. As for the other robots in the European version: Robby and Gort are from Forbidden Planet and The Day The Earth Stood Still respectively. Eddie and Marvin are from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Bob and Vincent are from The Black Hole, and finally Slave and Zen are from Blake's 7.

[@armorgeddon]

Fatal Racing in SVGA was choppy on a P100 (I also played the game on such a machine back then, S3 Trio64V+ based graphics card), 15 fps maybe, so perhaps you played it in VGA res. The SVGA version could only be started when there was a certain amount of RAM installied in the system, IIRC you needed 8 MB to run the game in SVGA. Btw I also mostly played it in splitscreen against my sister, but when I was using the steering wheel and she was on the keyboard she had zero chance to beat me so I often used the keyboard and let her have the steering wheel to make the racing between us more exciting.

[@weepingscorpion8739]

@@armorgeddon I should have led with that: I played it on VGA mode. When I had faster systems, I did try the SVGA mode but it just did not feel right. Sounds weird I know but there it is. I never had a steering wheel, tried it once but just couldn't get the feel for it. So my sister and I would only use keyboard, me on the arrow keys and she used WASD. Right shift and 1 for gear up and Right Ctrl and 2 for gear down.

[@luispereztasso]

Just discovered your channel after having a glimpse of memories about all the afternoons after middle school playing whiplash in my old lovely Compaq Presario, and, after almost 20 years, I didn't know about the cheat code until now. Subscribed.

[@ctrlaltrees]

Thanks for the kind comment and the subscription! Glad to have you here 🙂

[@LeeMc007]

Noticed one of the names was "Zen", that triggered the memory a bit, it was the name of the ship's computer in Blakes Seven iirc (yes, I'm old, deal with it) 😂😂

[@cd-lf8xm]

Thank you for putting this video up. These early 3d patches and implementations were often random and incomplete but preserving them is very important. Cheers!

[@Posesso]

So another lover of this. I think it is the only game I ever played and finished going to the maximum difficulty. I played with friends a lot, it was rather late that I thought of playing all the difficulty levels. That moment, when I finished the Impossible level, and then you get a whole set of tracks... I could not believe it. Like half a game more, just there, hidden, for the truly insane people. I mean ,if I had knew they existed I could have chase them and not be surprised, but I didn't. Watch out for Bob!

[@EasyMac308]

Bishop was Robert Redford's character in Sneakers.

[@jtsiomb]

One of my favourite games back then. Used to play a lot of split-screen with friends on my 486 (in low-res of course). I thought I remembered being jealous of a friend who bought a Cirrus Logic VLB card for his 486 and was able to run it on 640x480 (I only had an ISA card on the 486), but I conducted a recent experiment a couple of years ago, and it runs like ass even on a pentium with a PCI card in high-res, so I don't know what I remember any more. As for the S3 Virge, I had one on my pentium later on, but never even knew it was supposed to be a 3D accelerator. I bought it for its 2D acceleration, and it did that very well, so I have no hard feelings against it. Later on I paired it with a voodoo2 when I wanted 3D acceleration in games.

[@KomradeMikhail]

Did you ever get around to testing the Virge on a Pentium without MMX, or an i486 ?... The 3D Accelerator Wars made a much larger impact on those of us without MMX.

[@ctrlaltrees]

Not yet but it's definitely something I'm very interested in for a future video. My S3 journey isn't over yet!

[@MarkTheMorose]

@@ctrlaltrees S3 Virge: the 3D accelerator that never starts giving.

[@theonlymoo5e]

I fondly remember playing Whiplash. My friend & I got very good at all the tracks in the game (including the cheat mode circuit.

[@VicGreenBitcoin]

Hi I had the demo version of Fatal Racing, I remember when you jumped on the ramp you could sometimes see another race track just before the flats in the background. Unfortunately, with your version in the video it is green, but it may be visible with a different setting or video card. Even if you drive a really perfect race, the game (the Demo version) will tilt and you can continue racing without the demo always stopping.

[@xeroniris]

It's very interesting to see what the S3 Virge was actually like for DOS gamers, since my only experience of the chip was in a Cybervision 64/3D card which I used at various times in an Amiga 1200 tower, an Amiga 2000, and an Amiga 4000 (only briefly in the latter, I soon upgraded the 4000 to a mediator pci tower with voodoo 3, and the cv64/3d went back in the 2000).

[@armorgeddon]

Was there any game or software on the Amiga which could use the 3D acceletator of the Virge?

[@xeroniris]

@armorgeddon yeah it had a warp3d driver, so some games worked, but the cv64/3d had such a paltry amount of ram that a lot of warp3d apps and games wouldn't run. I did get glquake and descent running OK on it, but mostly I used it as a 2d card. When I had a Voodoo 3 in my A4000, that could run pretty much any app or game with Warp3D support.

[@armorgeddon]

@@xeroniris Thanks very much for the answer! That late Amiga-era is pretty obscure to me since back then I only used A500 and A600 models, which I didn't even own. Greets!

[@BrassicGamer]

I did love this game back in the day, even though it ran poorly on my 486DX4. Replaying it recently was great on my Pentium MMX, though sound effects irritate me much more easily these days and that's one of the worst parts of this game. Hugely impressed by your preservation efforts, regardless of the Virge's reputation.

[@theonlymoo5e]

I started playing Whiplash on a 386 LOL

[@trash_miner]

I got one of these recently i did not realize they were 3d cards! Time to try these games out!

[@AvexFuddle]

I do love the solid graphics of these 90’s era racers. Great stuff 😊👍

[@JoshRiolu]

I still have a cue/bin pair for Whiplash laying around...

[@MKT_19]

Greatest arcade racer of all time

[@konradkierzkowski1339]

Dave - probably reference to Hal 9000 from Space Odyssey Hal - well... yeah Nomad - reference to computer from War Games Bishop - reference to android from Aliens Marvin - the paranoid android Vincent - robot from Black Hole SAL - Depressed AI from Red Dwarf Mikey - probably reference to Metal Mickey Just my guessses ;)

[@Xoferif]

I fancy the "open-wheel thingy" is meant to be a Formula 1 car. 😃

[@ctrlaltrees]

As a Brit I reckon so too, but I didn't want to offend the Indycar fans in the audience. This is the internet after all 😁

[@pathfindercast]

I forgot about my S3 virge card. I didn't like that card as it would often crash my games. I was glad to get a voodoo card. After watching this I decided to play Fatal Racing for a bit. Interesting game play. Although it did not age well with the difficulty level settings.

[@loganjorgensen]

That is a gap I've heard about in software archiving, certain bespoke versions of games lost to all until they are filed. Nice Dwarf reference, I always kind of hoped for more merchandise or a computer game of Red Dwarf. I'll follow up my comments on ViRGE too heh. In hindsight I think their accelerators should have been like a hybrid SS/PS1/N64 graphics renderer in terms of screen resolution and turning effects on & off for different results. Like if you turned off all the filtering and such you'd get higher frame rates in software style rendered visual quality, if you turned everything on you'd drop screen resolution with a myriad of VESA like modes until the frame rate was where you wanted it Egs. 640x480 down to 256x192. Since it didn't have that type of control many simply fought with it, trying to make it accelerate something, anything. Same could be said of the rather low amounts of video memory many of the early 3D cards had too, where later games simply wouldn't run on them because there wasn't settings optimal to their limit.

[@eobet]

This was a lot of fun on LAN! I (unfortunately) went with the Creative 3D Blaster so this was one of the few games which supported that…

[@ncot_tech]

Not sure why, but there's something I quite like about software rendered 3D. Sure, the 3dfx version of Quake 2 is amazing with its coloured lighting, and I know there's none of that weird texture swimming that happens when hardware calculates 3D... but that short clip of the 3dfx version of this game with its razor sharp polygons covered with the same low-res textures just looks a bit ... naff. It's like the low resolution software rendering hides all that.

[@ctrlaltrees]

I know what you mean. Software rendered mode is how I remember playing Quake back in the day and anything else just looks off to me. It's an aesthetic that needs to make a comeback!

[@mybrainisshortcake]

oooh, I had an S3 Virge in my Compaq Presario (4834?) PII MMX 266mhz. I couldn't play *anything* with it and got a Voodoo III 16mb quickly! I think Midtown Madness and Star Trek: Starfleet Academy were the games I played on the Virge.

[@AndrewHelgeCox]

S3 Savage line had some chops for the low end, caveat driver quality.

[@RetroSegaDev]

This does remind me of Screamer but I seem to remember Screamer being more pleasant on the eye!

[@ctrlaltrees]

Screamer was definitely the better game!

[@theonlymoo5e]

@@ctrlaltrees, give me the graphics of screamer, but the tracks of Whiplash 😁

[@memeadam]

My childhood Windows 95 PC from PC world in the UK came with it called Whiplash instead of Fatal Racing.

[@GamerGee]

5:25 you’re supposed to turn right to stay on track.

[@AndrewHelgeCox]

Have you tried the software renderer on a modern multigHz PC?

[@janeks.4188]

Hello. Can zou tell me what to set up in dosbox, to run it in fullscreen mode_ I tried already the preconfigured version, nothing helped.

[@paulreese7788]

Hey if it’s any consolation the whole s3 Virgo was a disaster itself but cool to see the Virgo version of another game.

[@pacshb]

You have to drive some of the tracks in first-person mode rather than chase cam mode, otherwise it's too hard to position the car correctly for jumps and loops

[@mousqy]

i had this graphic card ...i even upgraded it by buying additional 2MB vram

[@synthzee]

What a gem.

[@lukasjozef1774]

I remember Fatal Racing but I played just the Shareware version. Screamer have had much much better gameplay and graphics. Excellent video.

[@VicGreenBitcoin]

Yes, I had the demo/shareware version to! If you managed to make a perfect race, no hits and full speed all the time the demo version did not stop and you could race the whole thing.

[@kyrieeleison1905]

geez the s3 version is running at about half the software versions resolution ... (s3 = 320 x 240, software = 640x480) .. u can roughly see that by getting a ruler and measuring the text and small HUD bars in the bottom left and comparing them... the s3 texts and HUD is twice the size .. ie it is running at half the resolution.. i would say if u run the software version at 320x240 there would be virtually no difference in frame rate.. is there a option in the game menu to just the resolution? the comparison needs to be done at the same resolution to see if anything is actually happening.. from the looks of it HP or s3 or the original game dev has put zero time and money into this s3 version.. and really this should be done on something like p166 as that was a very decent cpu when the game came out .. .the mmx233 was a year later in mid 97 .. the s3 may have helped more on a weaker cpu

[@SUNSHINE-t-m]

yay! preservation!!!

[@alexwalton9461]

I must have been the only person in the world stupid enough to buy the more expensive Diamond Stealth 3D 3000 with the Virge VX. I found out later that it was slower than the cheaper model.

[@ctrlaltrees]

Oh yes! Slower RAM I think?

[@lmcgregoruk]

Well a lot of people bought GeForce 4 MX's which were basically beefed up GeForce 2's thinking they were better than GeForce 3's

[@MexLuthor1970]

SLAVE and ZEN are ship computers from cult British sci-fi Blakes 7 :)

[@Garoninja]

You were wrong on the internet AGAIN!? HOW DARE YOU

[@ctrlaltrees]

Me? Never!

[@custardo]

It certainly looks like the bilinear filter was the only thing that was added. I'm pretty sure the unaccelerated performance in 320x200 is not that far off of what the Virge brings to the table. Getting all Virge supported games is great though!

[@SianaGearz]

I can't even see bilinear. Where? I don't suspect the patch is working properly. Virge has "free" bilinear (only slightly slower) but here textures are still nearest; and Virge is easily fast enough, that without transparency and with optimised drawing order, it will spit out decent framerate at 640x480 at best, but with very wavering performance. So you could go from 320x200 software rendered and really smooth to 640x480 Virge accelerated that was maybe faster or comparable on average, but very uneven and feeling worse, at least in games like Terminal Velocity, Actua Soccer, the games i had Virge versions of. Just because a release is bundled and maybe even checks for hardware family, doesn't mean it actually runs correctly using the S3D API. I'd say the worst thing about most S3D Virge releases is that you get locked into 640x480; but the cards are really not quite there, and 400x300 or 512x384 would make for a splendid compromise.

[@custardo]

@@SianaGearz A bilinear filter applied over the output image, not the textures

[@custardo]

SAL is HAL 9000's twin "sister" in 2010: odyssey 2. Bob and Vincent are the two robots from Disney's The Black Hole.

[@ctrlaltrees]

Thanks! I've never seen The Black Hole, very interesting 🙂

[@Xoferif]

@@ctrlaltrees Give it a look, there's nothing quite like it! I can't quite believe it's a product of 70s Disney - it's actually pretty dark for a PG film. 😃

[@MarkTheMorose]

Robbie is from The Forbidden Planet, featuring Leslie Nielsen before his comic persona; Gort is from The Day The Earth Stood Still; not sure about Voyager, unless they mean V'Ger, from the first Star Trek film (perhaps Gremlin's font didn't have an apostrophe, so they spelled it out in full).

[@Xoferif]

"Nomad" was a robot probe from an episode the original series of Star Trek which they kind of copied the plot from for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, so "Voyager" fits as well.

[@decidedly_retro]

I don’t know about Bob but Vincent is from “The Black Hole”. Bishop rings a bell but I can’t place it. Slave and Zen are from “Blake’s 7”, SAL and HAL are from 2001/2010. Eddie and Marvin are obviously from “The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”.

[@MarkTheMorose]

@@decidedly_retro Easy: Bishop is from Aliens (played by Lance Henriksen), and BOB is actually 'Old B.O.B.', the older version of the Vincent robot also from The Black Hole. Voiced by Slim Pickens, more usually seen in westerns.

[@JakeWorrell]

RE the robots: Marvin will probably be a reference 'the paranoid android' from The Hitch-hiker's guide to the galaxy. He has terrible pain in all the diodes down his left side you know

[@ctrlaltrees]

Ah yes, I forgot to mention those! Good spot though 🙂

[@Xoferif]

"Eddie" is the computer on the starship The Heart of Gold, also from Hitch-Hiker's.

[@yuan.pingchen3056]

How to confirm or verify the fatal racing utilize the S3-Virge 3d acceleration? there is no direct3D API in that age....

[@armorgeddon]

I can't confirm this for the Virge-accelerated version of this game but usually there are different exe-files for hardware accelerated DOS games for the different APIs. For example you start this game in 3dfx Glide-mode via WHIP3DFX.EXE.

[@nicolasdecicilia9195]

GREAT GAME!!! GREAT!

[@a500]

Such an exciting and fast moving time. My favourite era of gaming. And really nice to conclude the s3 story.

[@CinePhil101]

❤❤❤

[@WhatHoSnorkers]

Interesting and very thorough! The game looks interesting, a bit like Hard Drivin' but with more crashes!

[@Trusteft]

So one would buy this 3D card to get to play the game slightly smoother, but at lower resolution. So why not not buy the card and just lower the resolution? I wish I could remember if I had this card back then. I think my first 3D card was a Mystique so probably not. Anyway, good video, thank you for sharing and well done on the adequate green screen.

[@ctrlaltrees]

Certainly explains why this card was nicknamed the "3D Decelerator" at the time. Its rendering still leaned heavily on the CPU and so it didn't really provide any real benefit. Although as I discovered in my previous video, there are a few games that seemed to be marginally better than the software renderer - not enough to justify actually buying one of these though, IMO 😉

[@thepirategamerboy12]

I've tried the 3Dfx Voodoo patch, and tbh I prefer the look of the software renderer. The texture filtering on the clouds looks pretty awful, for example.

[@ctrlaltrees]

I definitely need to give it a try at some point. Some of those early Voodoo games were definitely weird looking!

[@Caleb-fv5fp]

Software should always be in 320x200/240 maybe 300x400 for a faster cpu imo. 480p is only for 3d acceleration

[@death2all79zx]

They should have kept girly.

[@msigamingz4184]

Bro your driving is awful, tracks are perfect specially after you hear That is a Lap Recooooooooooorrrrrdddddd 🎉🎉🎉

[@sirrichardpitchard]

Jesus Christ. I’m in awe of the amount of work that went into this 😂

[@ctrlaltrees]

That's ADHD for you 😆