Jonathan Thomas @atariste.bsky.social

This is the latest build of the Atari STE game I am now provisonally calling "Cavey Taxi". Pick up passengers in a tight cave complex and drop them off elsewhere, fighting gravity, time and fuel consumption. With pretty parallax scrolling and particles. What's not to like? 😀

@Sut1978 Yes, Lotus STE is my work. 😀 As is the 2017 conversion of Pole Position for the STE if you’ve not yet seen that. The biggest challenge I’d face with Lotus 2 is getting everything back on a single floppy. Lots of additional binary data on this enhanced version.

@RetroRacing I’ve no knowledge but wonder if you nail one stage, that the code may be transferrable to the others with a little tinkering ? Did you work on the Lotus 1 enhancement as well ? I started following you once I saw the awesome FaSTEr 👍

Latest work on my #AtariSTE enhanced version of Lotus 2, now with a sky gradient similar to that featured in the #Amiga version. Still loads of work to do in various areas but it's looking good and performing well. 👍 🚗 I'll probably release as a single stage proof of concept.

@Sut1978 I’ve been meaning to put a frame counter in place to accurately measure fps. The main objective is to increase graphical fidelity rather than increase fps though.

@RetroRacing What fps does it run as standard and what are you hoping to improve it to ?

@Sut1978 I’ll certainly aim to release a disk image that lets you play through an enhanced version of the first stage. I’m a bit daunted by the prospect of enhancing the entire game though!

@RetroRacing Love this game as it is, if you can improve it chefs kiss

@radres I’m struggling a bit to understand what you’re trying to convey here. Do you understand the context of this project, and are you aware of my previous work on the Lotus games?

@RetroRacing proof of concept? more like proof of wasted time. sky gradients don’t fix bad code. good luck with that “single stage” fantasy.

@JooRalha1 There are indeed a lot of glitches João - I still have a lot of work left to do on this. 😀 The only thing that will be very difficult to solve on the ST is the flickering raster bars - they could be made more stable, but at the expense of a large drop in framerate. 😞

@RetroRacing A lot of gfx glitches. Is it normal for the STE Blitter? I know I can disable the waitblitter flag on the Amiga, but the corruption that may occur is nothing of this sort. Seems like it's drawing odd lines and unbufering even ones in a frame...

@postinopazzoide Definitely a possibility on both counts. I'll look into it.

@RetroRacing Do you think it would be possible to add rear brake lights on STE, and maybe do the same in the Amiga version of Faster?

Spent several hours last night rewriting and optimising the 68k code that draws the rev counter on the #AtariST version of Lotus 2 to use the Blitter chip instead. These are the lengths that us ST folks are willing to go to in order to compete with that other machine. 😉

@000Angus000 The IBM PC, of course. 😛

@RetroRacing Which other machine? 😉

@AtariCrypt A floppy image will be forthcoming at some distant point in the unspecified future. 😄

@RetroRacing Thank you 💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻

@games_rozz Arcade racing games aren't considered to have mainstream appeal nowadays. I don't know when this happened - they were very much a mainstream genre back in the 80s and 90s. 😞

@Atari_VB_Pod I’ll need a bit more time to work out how to get all these goodies onto a disk image. It’s rather more complicated than Lotus 1 🤔

@RetroRacing Amazing! Can we play?

Spent a couple of days progressing the #AtariSTE enhanced version of Lotus 2 using some of the knowledge and techniques gained while developing FaSTer. Still some way to go, but much closer to the #Amiga version than before. And yes, it's quite glitchy at the moment. 😄

@postinopazzoide Ita likely that any initial release will just be a one level proof of concept to show what might have been possible. So Amiga/ST cross play would work as expected on the first level, and then perhaps do strange things once the Amiga proceeds to level 2.

@RetroRacing It already looks very impressive. Will you keep the cross-platform link-up with Amiga like in the original version?

@se_bkmc_us Thank you - I will!

@RetroRacing This is a wonderful screen. Please keep up the good work.

@WizkidCoder Thanks Cal! Yeah, modern C compilers help a lot as well - I don't think I'd get anything like the same results from a 1980s compiler as I do from modern GCC. But with this tooling in place, writing game logic in C and graphics routines in 68k seems to be a pragmatic pattern,

@ScottElkington Hi Scott. Lotus 2 is a lot more tailored for the specific strengths of the Amiga hardware than Lotus 1 ever was. Multi-coloured cars, and road stripes drawn using palette switching are two good examples - easy on Amiga but a lot more challenging to get right on STE. 😞

@RetroRacing Great work Jonathan.. what technically is the biggest difference between Lotus 1 & 2.. screen size.. or more going off under the hood?

@qda No relation. FaSTer is my original racing game for the Atari STE, released in December 2024. Check my Twitter feed for more.

@RetroRacing what is "FaSTer", and is it related to MiSTer?

@WizkidCoder I get my kicks out of writing something in C to get the shape of the algorithm correct, then converting to 68k to get it running at the speed I want. I’m pretty daunted by instruction sets such as Z80 and 6502 that lack 32bit registers and hardware mul/div though.

@AtariCrypt @TLtwg It's currently so early, I haven't even worked out how to get it onto a floppy image. 😄 But now that we're here, do you think the pace of the original ST version was a bit slow? These STE mods make the game run faster as well as smoother, if you know what I mean.

@RetroRacing @TLtwg Gimme that floppy image, completed or not!! 🏆

One of my fave ST racers this. It's old, but I love it! ataricrypt.blogspot.com/2016/02/road-b… #Atari #Racing #AtariST