ryanfb

Pretty happy with the main game loop and difficulty ramp right now: (forgot to move my cursor out the way when recording) Might try to add a little more polish, but at least I have something that works for the most part. Here are the current word lists, if there's any suggestions. I tried to avoid ambiguity but I think the difficulty is still good (it ramps from mixing in "bad words" to mixing in "hard words", and also increases the difficulty in other ways as your score goes up):

Thanks! Glad I'm not steppin' on any cruisin' toes. Got a MAME/JSMESS "outrun" driver built and working with my ROM in a local webpage by following these instructions, and did a little bit more work on the actual "game loop". This week and weekend are pretty busy for me, so I'm trying to work with a mind to being able to stop at any point and still have a working game. So it might not have all the silly features I can dream up, but it should at least run and be a playable game!

Thanks! These are all great suggestions. I think the easiest option for running will be to package it up in a webpage with JSMESS pointing to a configured ROM, like what the Internet Archive has for the original Out Run. (Plus a downloadable version of the ROM as well, for people who want to run it locally in MAME…or anyone maniacal enough to try it on real hardware). It looks like I can do that on itchio. Text rendering is tricky, and I might have to wind up sticking with the sorta-clunky "text drops down from the top". Text rendering on the Out Run hardware gets its own rendering layer and ROM bank, completely separate (and inaddressable, it seems) from the sprite rendering layer. This splits the screen into 64x28 cells of text, so you can't smoothly scroll text down the screen. I've hooked up some controls (with bonus car sprite angle-changing as it moves across the screen!) and the very first pass at dropping words: One interesting discovery while coding this was that there's a bug (also in the original Out Run game) where the Ferrari logo flips as the car moves across the screen (because there's just one Ferrari sprite that gets horizontally flipped). With how many sprites they have for other rare things in the game, I'm pretty surprised they didn't just use a separate sprite for the logo! Digging into this project has let me learn all sorts of interesting things about the original Out Run game, and how much care was put into some of the ports/updates. For example, the original Out Run hardware had a bug in the percussion samples introduced during ROM manufacturing that distorted some of the music tracks which they fixed for the 20th anniversary edition of the soundtrack (see also this interview about how they fixed even more subtle issues for the 3DS version). For the 3DS port of Out Run, they composed two new songs on the original arcade Z80/YM2151 sound hardware. That's hardcore.

One thing I'm wondering about as I'm working on this is what words should count as "rhymes with cruisin'". One clear-cut criteria would be that it has to end in the "-oozin" sound ("oozin'" is definitely on the good words list). This would mean words like "wooshin'", "dupin'", or "Rodkin" wouldn't count as rhymes. Part of my reasoning is this also makes it easier to add a little challenge by starting out with words that definitely don't rhyme with cruisin' ("Goldblum", "wizard", etc.) then ramping up the difficulty by mixing in words that nearly sort of rhyme. But I can see people getting frustrated with that too, if they think a rhyme is close enough. Any thoughts?