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A homebrew developer is working on bringing Electronic Arts' 1994 3DO racer The Need For Speed to the real Atari Jaguar hardware, in an experiment to see how far they can push the almost 33-year-old hardware.
Budfolk is the developer of the Atari Jaguar homebrew game, Jagracer, but has recently picked up the "side project" to test ideas, suggesting that "the good stuff may find its way back into Jagracer" at a later date.
A couple of days ago, the developer published a video of what they are calling "very early alpha." This showed the track and the in-car view running on the Jaguar Emulator BigPEmu, without car physics, opponents, menus, or music. Regardless, it seems to have already generated some excitement online, with people praising the effort and wondering what a finished Jaguar version of The Need For Speed could look like.
"The Jaguar was never really known for smooth, textured 3D racing," Budfolk wrote in the video description, describing his reasons for taking on the project. "So this is me trying to see how close I can get, rebuilt faithfully from the original game's own data.
"Everything here — the camera, the road, the scenery — is worked out from how the original 3DO game actually did it, not guessed. That's the whole point: get it right, piece by piece."
Despite the project still being in its early days, progress looks to be coming thick and fast, with Budfolk having already uploaded a second video showing an updated build featuring the project's "biggest FPS improvement so far." According to the developer, this was achieved as "the Jaguar now overlaps more work: while the GPU and Blitter render one frame, the 68k already culls and prepares the next one," with the developer stating, "The next step could be using Jerry [one of the Jaguar's coprocessors] to transform and clip future geometry while the GPU keeps rendering.
As he states, the background in this video "is still only a placeholder", with one of the current challenges being to find "a good Jaguar-friendly solution" to achieve the 3DO's "360-degree projected panorama."
He continues, "My goal remains faithful 3DO-quality visuals, which in my opinion are clearly better than the Saturn version. The original 3DO programmers deserve serious kudos. The deeper I study their work, the more impressive it becomes."
If you want to follow along with the project, you can do so over on Budfolk's YouTube channel. This is also where you'll find updates on Jagracer's development.