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Video game development is full of names that have made groundbreaking steps you’ve never even heard about. Shawn Nash is a behind-the-scenes pioneer responsible for SODA Off Road Racing’s incredible physics, Papyrus’ graphical advancements and iRacing’s use of laser scan data for the physical track surfaces.

This interview with RSC, published in 2021, details his early life and career, through both his own company, Papyrus, Electronic Arts, to his time at iRacing.

Richard Yasi on Grand Prix Legends, Papyrus, and The Final Days of a Studio

If you ever played Papyrus’ seminal Grand Prix Legends then you’ve read his name. Rich began working as a tester on NASCAR Racing (1994) and was with Papyrus at the end. In this interview, published in 2022, we discuss his time at the legendary studio and the design of Grand Prix Legends, including initial feelings of hurt at not being asked to join iRacing.

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Rendition Graphics Wrapper For IndyCar Racing II, Formula 1, Grand Prix Legends And SODA Off Road Racing Reaches Alpha Stage

Tim Wheatley - Game News | Apr 2April 2

139 Comments

Rendition graphics barely took off and was quickly overtaken by 3DFX and then Direct 3D (what became Direct X), but for sim racers, it is the only way to play certain games outside software rendering. While many titles got 3DFX or Direct 3D support directly from Papyrus, IndyCar Racing II remained stuck as standard SVGA and a 640×480 resolution, and has required real 1996-era hardware to get results like this:

320×240 software, 640×480 software, Rendition hardware, Rendition hardware with updated Rendition track art.

A couple of years after I posted my profile of IndyCar Racing II in Rendition a user began posting replies showing progress of a Rendition graphics wrapper he was writing, and I am happy to say that it already works for all the Rendition RRedline (Windows) titles that ever ran on a Rendition video card including Grand Prix Legends, SODA Off Road Racing and Psygnosis’ Formula 1. Rendition is the only way to run SODA Off Road Racing with anti-aliasing.

What remains, and has recently made major progress (as shown below), is Rendition Speedy3D (DOS). Speedy3D is used by IndyCar Racing II/CART Racing and is a rendering option in both NASCAR Racing 2 and NASCAR Racing 1999 Edition. While other options exist to render both N2 and NR1999, IndyCar Racing II can only have translucent smoke and dirt along with anti-aliasing via Rendition.

The video, posted in our forum this morning and embedded below, shows off what will be an open source fork of DOSBOX that will talk to the wrapper through a named pipe, just like glidos (a 3DFX wrapper for DOSBOX).

It’s work-in-progress, running slightly in slow motion for the video (that could be something as simple as upping the CPU cycles in DOSBOX), but to see this kind of progress for Speedy3D I figured it was worth a news report, even if just to inform that RRedline support for Windows is fully working already (supporting Tomb Raider, vQuake and more, too). Check out the forum thread for more info.

View this video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/SeWK1FGp_e8 and please consider subscribing to RSC’s main channel.

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sharangad Oct 17, 2023 #1

Is there anywhere I can get hold of a copy of Indy Car Racing II : The Rendition Experience?

Nothing on ebay, short of prying a copying out of someone's cold dead hands.

I'm working on a Rendition Verité wrapper (already supports all 13 Windows games). I'd like to add support for Speedy 3D/DOS, but find ICR2 is impossibly difficult.

My wrapper can be seen in action here:

,
here:

and here:

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sharangad Oct 27, 2023 #2

And here's a bugfixed version of SODA's menu:

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sharangad Oct 27, 2023 #3

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Tim Wheatley Oct 27, 2023 #4

@sharangad Very cool!! You probably want to look for CART Racing, which will usually have a DOS folder and within that, a REND folder. That is the re-release of IndyCar Racing II when IndyCar and CART split... So they had to rebrand it.

The ICR2/CART rend version will only work without issues on the v1, but you can switch out files as the article described for a v2 Rendition card. This does cause other issues though, so a wrapper would be amazing. The DOS+Rend version won't run in Windows (even in a DOS window on Win95) at all. So I hope you can figure something out :)

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Tim Wheatley Oct 27, 2023 #5

Yep, here you go:
DOS/REND/CART.EXE @ https://archive.org/details/sierra-indycar

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USCTrojan4JC Oct 27, 2023 #6

This would be amazing, @sharangad! Please keep us posted on how we can support your efforts.

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sharangad Oct 27, 2023 #7

Cheers for your kind word guys and the link and instructions!

The official RReady wrapper thread is here:

https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=95721

There's a watermarked but fully functional and time unlimited version on that thread.

There's also a watermark free paid version for $9.99 on the WIndows Store (RReady Renditon Verité), if anyone's interested. If there're taker please try the free version first (called an alpha) to see if it works on your system. The two versions are identical except for the launcher which doesn't have an auto-downloader for demos and stuff because of store rules on bundleware. Download links to Rendition specific game binaries and demos are supplied with the paid version (again identical to the free version) but you have to download and unzip them yourself. Steam and the Epic store refused to carry it so I'm stuck with Microsoft.

DOS support is already under investigation. vQuake 1 doesn't appear to be a dynamic overlay based app so the actual API calls are visible. vHexen II has rendering issues with a few things and that's the priority at the moment.

Rest assured, I'm definitely going to add DOS support to RReady. For DOS based apps RReady's going to report itself as a V1000. For WIndows currently it's a V2000. DOSBox Staging will be used at first. The existing launcher will get a new tab for DOS apps and updated with a custom build of DOS Box staging .

Once again, cheers guys!

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skchow Oct 27, 2023 #8

@sharangad Thank you so much for this project. The small but passionate community of ICR2 players have been wishing for a Rendition wrapper for many years.

I have an old PC that has a Rendition V2100 4 MB card which isn't fully compatible with the game and requires some tinkering to run. It would be great that your wrapper could work like a V1000.

One thing I have noticed when I played ICR2 using my Rendition card is that the game will crash with an out-of-memory error if I am trying to load a particularly large track (e.g. that ones that are converted from a newer Papyrus game or scratch built with a higher level of complexity and file sizes compared to the default tracks). I wonder if your wrapper can simulate the Rendition card having higher amount of memory.

I am also curious if you think the game could potentially be played at high resolution than 640x480. I know the UI and some textures like the cockpit are hard coded to fit 640x480 so I wonder if those would get stretched to fit the screen.

But honestly, I would just love to see it running in a wrapper with the original specs. That would be incredible already. Thank you so much for your efforts.

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sharangad Nov 11, 2023 #9

RReady emulates a V2200 with 128 MB of RAM and yes it can upscale already (for Windows apps). The RAM limit can be pushed out further but a few of the Windows apps don't run right with too much VRAM. Most of my videos are at 4k/UDH (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCucgSfuk0etI9t9-mKAA05g)

You can try out the a watermarked and free version of the wrapper here:
RReady Fully Tested Releae( November 6 2023)
https://1drv.ms/u/s!As-dKk-N73dSlmIfZk1e2zquKYDk?e=FdXAcS
MD5: 6e75dda5f5dde0d5577383b7bc90480f
- Fixes VH2 texture corruption issues.
- Adds MSAA as the default vQuake 2/vHexen II AA mode. This is a stopgap measure until a full implementation of Rendition's proprietary Quake specific AA is fully implemented.

(This release is live on the Windows store as well without a watermark)

It doesn't support Speedy3d/DOS apps (yet). That's what I'm furiously trying to fix.

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sharangad Nov 11, 2023 #10

The full discussion on vogons can be found here:
https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=95721

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Tim Wheatley Nov 11, 2023 #11

Are you planning to release it as a non-Windows store version? I don't mind paying.

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Back from the ashes since July, 2019. First created in 2001 with the merger of Legends Central (founded 1999) and simracing.dk.

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