Race Drivin' SA-1: Two Years Release. Grab the FastROM version here!

After two years, Race Drivin' SA-1 continues to be one of my favorite SA-1 versions. I also made a FastROM version of it, but I believe I never had the change to release it to everyone before.

For who don't remember, Race Drivin' ran at average 4.77 FPS and had a frame buffer capped at 12 FPS (so even if the game ran faster, it wouldn't get past 12 FPS). The SA-1 version not just made the game run much faster but also optimized the NMI routine aggressively to allow to the frame buffer run up to 30 FPS.

On the above picture, you can see the average frame rate the original Race Drivin' on SlowROM.

During the SA-1 development, I made a FastROM version to figure out how the game would perform. There was some decent frame rate improvement and given that I decided to edit the game NMI handler to remove the 12 FPS restriction, allowing to the game run up to 30 FPS as well in FastROM.

It's not perfect, because there's not the same NMI improvements from the SA-1 version, there's some tiles that fails to transfer to the VRAM due of the v-blanking time constraints.

In addition, the average frame rate improvement is only 2% compared to SlowROM and I really had to use SA-1 at full power to make the game run faster. But it's a fun experiment to you see how the game would run on the FastROM.

There's no delta-based correction either, because the SNES CPU lacks the 32-bit multiplication registers for allowing the same technique to be used. So the game title screen may fail due of the non-controlled internal speed vs. frame rate ratio.

Anyways, I hope you have fun with this. It's a little post, but it's important to show a bit more of what I have done in the past so more people can learn and do similar projects in the future. The source code is also available under attachments and don't forget that this is a BPS patch, and the SnesLab Wiki has a complete and quick guide on how apply BPS patches.

Overall, this game has so much potential. I think if we had the time, it would be totally fun to make a track editor for this game, which allows you to build some very simple 3D assets, so you can make your own racing tracks and share with everyone. The 3D engine is very simple to use and has a lot of possibilities, disregarding the lack of polish on a few spots that can be improved. And some music would be super welcome. What if we could add racing like music to the game, from Top Gear to Initial D?