A5: A-Train 5 / A列車で行こう5 (1996) Opening - NEC PowerVR PCX1 (PC 3DEngine) & Pentium Pro 200 computer
Here is footage of the opening cutscene/cinematic in A5 (Version 1.0.0 compiled on December 20th 1996). This is NOT an FMV cinematic, this is running in real-time (at a resolution of 640x480 pixels) on the NEC PowerVR PCX1 3D accelerator (GPU) and Pentium Pro processor. The shadows that buildings and trains cast in the footage are shadow volumes rendered by the PowerVR 3D card and are part of the hardware features of the Series 1 cards (PCX1 and its successor PCX2).
The opening can NOT be watched unless a PowerVR Series 1 card is installed in the system, but the game can still be played without a PowerVR card (albeit without 3D view/3D graphics available, only 2D view will work). The shadow volumes do not appear in the game itself, only in the opening. The Playstation version's opening is an FMV sequence based on a video recording of the original PowerVR version of A5.
The game is called "Urban Development Simulation Game A-Train 5" according to the application's title bar. The "バージョン情報" (version information) screen, which is basically the "About..." section of A5, indicates that the game can be run in both "Normal CPU Mode" and also an MMX enhanced mode according to the manual, as A5 is one of the first x86 applications to support MMX instructions usage/optimizations.
Here are the specifications for the computer/PC being used:
- Dell OptiPlex GXPro case and motherboard (manufactured in July 1996)
- Intel 440FX chipset
- Intel Pentium Pro 200 Mhz (256KB L2 cache) processor
- S3 Trio64V+ (2MB) video card
- NEC PC 3DEngine (NEC PowerVR PCX1) accelerator card
- Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE32 (CT3900) sound card
- 256 MBs of EDO DRAM/memory
- Microsoft Windows 95 (Japanese OSR 2.1 OEM) operating system
A Ressha De Ikou 5 by Artdink (1996)
#windows95 #atrain #powervr #artdink