games - topspeed 300

Topspeed 300

TOPSPEED 300 is a little racing game I wrote in 1996-1997. It was basically a project designed to make use of the 3D engine I had developed the year before. I was really excited about doing fancy 3D graphics with texture mapping and shading back then.

All this took place at a time when computers were becoming fast enough to do more realistic 3D graphics at least at lower resolutions, but shortly before 3D accelerators became a mainstream PC accessory. The ->first racing games using texture mapping had just come out and initially looked very impressive. And while some people continued to develop ->racing games that felt like they were from the 1980s, and some games that came out were ->really not that good, others were ->a lot of fun and some ->started off large and incredibly successful franchises. My little game did not, but you get it for free, and you wouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth, right?

The game was developed for MS DOS. It does work with older Windows versions (95, 98, ME, XP), but not with current-generation operating systems. I therefore recommend using an emulator such as ->DOSBox. With this emulator it'll also run on OS X and Linux. In the download section below, you will find versions of the game for Windows and OS X that are already bundled with DOSBox and set up to run out-of-the box without any need for further configuation.

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Download
All downloads below inclode both the English and the German version of the game. It is recommended that you download a version that is already bundeled with DOSBox and preconfigured to work well.

downloadTopspeed300_Win.zip3.8 MB Windows version, includes DOSBox, fully configured, ready to run
downloadTopspeed300_OSX.dmg10.7 MB OS X version, includes DOSBox, fully configured, ready to run
downloadTopspeed300_DOS.zip2.0 MB original version for DOS

If something does not work as expected, or if you have questions, please ->contact me.

Play Online

Thanks to the folks at ->PlayDOSGames.com, you can now play this game online, in your browser. It's not really running very fast (have patience while races are loading, and don't expect more than a few frames per second), but it works. As far as I understand, DOSBox is basically compiled into JavaScript code (using Emscripten). In other words, your browser is emulating a full PC using a scripting language, which is pretty awesome. Follow this link ->to try out Topspeed 300 in your browser. [Tip: Select the following when the game starts: Soundblaster, 220, 7, 1]

Instructions and Further Information

To run the game, follow these steps:

  • Windows version
    1. Unzip the archive to a destination of your choice.
    2. Inside the "Topspeed 300" folder, launch either "Topspeed 300 (English).bat" or "Topspeed 300 (German).bat", depending on your preferred language.
  • OS X version
    1. Download, then mount the DMG image by double-clicking on it. It contains two applications, "Topspeed 300 (English)" and "Topspeed 300 (German)". Choose the one you want (or both), and then copy it to a destination of your choice (such as Applications, the Desktop or wherever you keep your games) on your computer by drag-and-drop.
    2. Launch the game by double-clicking on the application icon.

You control the game with the keyboard or a joystick. The predefined keyboard controls are:

cursor keys [←][→][↑][↓] steering, accelerate, brake
[space], [alt] shift up, shift down
[P] or [Pause] pause the game
[Esc] exit game
[F1] - [F3] switch perspective: inside car - behind car - helicopter

If you have a joystick or game pad connected, you can also configure joystick controls. You will need to start by calibrating the joystick. Select the corresponding option in the controls section of the options menu. To calibrate, move the joystick all the way to the left, right, up and down. Once the calibration is completed, you can reconfigure your controls to use the joystick. Please remember that back in the day, analog joysticks did not have as many buttons as today's gaming gear, so don't expect all buttons to work.

If you get stuck against a wall, always remember that you can shift into reverse and back up.

There are also some options to adjust quality of the graphics.

[1] - [5] turn texturing on and off for street, landscape, various objects, and sky
[Pg up] and [Pg dn] adjust size of rendered screen; only works in behind-car or helicopter view

Finally, I have some previously undocumented features to report. Pressing [F7]+[F8] shows some debug information, including the current frame rate. [F9]+[F10] will show a (very basic) map. The different colours on the map show different segments of the track. The track had to be divided into segments of less than 64kB, because that was the most amount of memory that could be addressed at a time with a single data structure in DOS. Incredible.

I have set up DOSBox so that the game has a frame rate of typically a little over 60 fps. Changing the speed of the emulated computer will result in frame rate changes. Note that higher rates don't make a lot of sense, as the game logic runs at 50 Hz, if memery serves, which means you are never going to see more than 50 different frames per second, no matter the rate at which they are drawn.