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.
RSC contains a database of 153 developers, 467 software titles, 374 cars, 42 bikes, 242 tracks and more...ICR2 is a simulation of the 1995 IndyCar Series. It featured 15 tracks and a selection of chassis and engines.
Re-released as CART Racing.
RSC Podcast Episode 7 – Management Simulations, F1 Managers, Always Used To Be Better?Join Jon Denton, Tim Wheatley, Simon Croft and guest(s) as they discuss sim racing and racing games past, present and future.
RSC contains a database of news items. Our #OnThisDay page shows current day and current week of years past...
RSC contains a database of videos back to the 1980s catalogued as intros, laps, trailers, unboxings and more...
RSC contains a database of emulated software you can play in your browser...
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.
ICR2 is a simulation of the 1995 IndyCar Series. It featured 15 tracks and a selection of chassis and engines.
Re-released as CART Racing.
NASCAR Racing 2 is a 1996 racing video game by Papyrus Design Group based on the NASCAR Winston Cup Series of the same year, with a later addon for the 1997 Busch Grand National Series. It featured many drivers, Gen-4 chassis and tracks from both series.
Papyrus developed this title and released multiple NASCAR-based video games with incremental changes up until their transition to the “GPL engine” used in NASCAR Racing 4.
Official 1997 Busch Grand National Series addon for NASCAR Racing 2, featuring many drivers, teams and tracks from the Busch series.
SODA is a simulation based on the Short Course Off-Road Drivers series, but did not contain any officially licensed cars or real-world tracks.
GPL is a simulation of the 1967 Formula One World Championship. It includes 11 tracks (10 from the real-life schedule) and allows the player to choose from seven period cars.
The first title from Papyrus to include all three major NASCAR series without the use of paid additions, NASCAR Racing 1999 Edition was unfortunately a graphically updated NASCAR Racing 2 underneath the surface. By the time of its release there were more advanced simulations coming on the market.
