Game:

Rad Racer (1987)

Duration: 15:42

45 views

1

No Commentary / 4k60 (4:3 Integer Upscale) / "Digital Prime (FBX)" Color Palette / Decent Player
Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR44Lsym0AXzlkcixYzLe0jhU

This is being played on an "AnaloguePocket" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!
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If you're a RAD enough dude, you should be able to handle the ridiculous speeds of this popular NES racer by Square! Yeah, you might have heard of their other decidedly less bodacious series, Final Fantasy. Pshaw! That's for nerds! Rad Racer feeds my need for speed!


Courses and enemy vehicles featured in this video:
Player Vehicle - 328 Twin Turbo

Los Angeles Night Way - Lamborghini
Snow White Line - Lotus
Seaway in Typhoon - Porsche
Last Seaside Running - Testarossa


I'm always holding the acceleration button AND the UP button for the turbo which kicks in at 90 km/h or higher! Yeah. We've gone all Euro here, deal! I attenuate my speed with the brakes on turns or when otherwise needed, but I never let go of those other buttons!

The game manual told me of this tubular button combo that'll let me retry a course if I don't make it to the goal in time by holding A when pressing Start after a Game Over on the "PRESS START" screen. Don't worry, I edited out those crashes, but it still wipes out my score. Bummer!

Some dork told me to let you know that this game has some extra black space on the bottom of the screen, but who cares? I'm too busy keeping my eyes on the road!
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Technical Notes:
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TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct. Watch in 4k if your computer can handle it.


This video has suffered no lossy compression before reaching YouTube! It's a lossless video file with no chroma subsampling (4:4:4). Essentially, it's a perfect copy until YouTube works its magic which now makes it a 4:2:0 video with lossy compression, yes. However, the better the initial copy... the better!

I went for a 4:3 output with pixel perfect sharpness via integer upscales. 4:3 was selected because this was the aspect ratio people played the game in on the original console. The video is compressed losslessly so no definition is lost.

256 x 240 - internal NES resolution
256* 10 = 2560 / 4 = 640
240* 8 = 1920 / 3 = 640

2560 x 1920 = 4:3

So you can fit the nearest neighbor upscales in a 4k frame and suffer no interpolation and have it in 4:3!


I'm using the "Digital Prime (FBX)" Color Palette developed by FirebrandX. The Nintendo Entertainment System does not have any way of letting you know what it's colors should be EXACTLY by our current digital standards. It was all analog and can't be translated precisely. This hasn't stopped some people from trying though! The "Digital Prime (FBX)" Color Palette was developed to look very nice and accurate to how a modern day NES would appear!


About the Analogue Pocket: It's a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in layman's terms (BY a layman): It's a "chip" dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another "chip". Basically, if you can reverse engineer a NES exactly, you can pretty much program this "chip" to behave like a NES exactly. Which is what this is.

I'm playing this using the OpenFPGA feature on the Analogue Pocket which allows developers to import/create cores (systems) to be used by the FPGA "chip". The "Spiritualized NES" core is the one being played on and is widely considered to be a port of the core in Analogue's "NT Mini/Noir" systems and made by the same developer.

I'm using the Analogue Dock to play this on my TV and capture the footage.