Duration: 0:00

156 views

7

REAL HARDWARE CAPTURE IN 4:3 ASPECT RATIO. Commentary subtitles are available!
Sorry for the few horizontal lines of black pixels at the top of the image! Capture card wouldn’t play ball with the Matrox drivers or video card for some reason.

I know what you might be thinking; didn’t I already make a bunch of videos on A-Train 5/A5 (made by Artdink, compiled December 1996, released January 1997) before on this channel? Yes, that’s true but they leave a lot to be desired for more than one obvious reason (low upload resolution). However, the worst offence was that I, due to some slight language barrier reasons (i.e. incompetence), completely missed the one setting that enabled the dynamic shadow volumes in-game (as opposed to the opening cutscene, where they are always enabled). These aren’t just any ordinary shadows; they update in real-time for EVERY polygonal object within the scene in accordance with the day-and-night cycle (which can be toggled on or off), they project onto other objects and surfaces with accuracy AND — on top of all that — every object exhibits self-shadowing! This is easily the most extensive use of shadow volumes on the PowerVR Series 1 cards (PCX1 & PCX2) that I have ever seen. It looks SO GOOD but of course it can also make your contemporary Pentium Pro or MMX 200 MHz processor run like an absolute dog when a lot of shadows are active at once!

This footage and audio was captured from the following computer:
Dell OptiPlex GXPro case and motherboard (manufactured in July 1996 according to case label)
Intel 440FX chipset
Intel Pentium Pro 200 Mhz (256KB L2 cache) processor (manufactured around the same time as motherboard; shortly before July 1996)
Matrox Millennium IS-STORM/MGA-2064W (2MB) video card (manufactured in late 1995)
NEC PC 3DEngine (NEC PowerVR PCX1) accelerator card (NEC serial number starts with 6Y, with the first character denoting year and second one the month (1-9 = Jan to Sept and X/Y/Z = Oct/Nov/Dec), meaning that it's from November 1996)
Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE32 (CT3900) sound card (manufactured week 15 1995)
128 MBs of EDO DRAM/memory (not quite contemporary in age but I'm working on finding some)
Microsoft Windows 95 (Japanese OSR 2.1 OEM) operating system

The capturing was done with VCS (which can be found on the Internet Archive) and OBS Studio using a Datapath VisionRGB-E1S PCI-Express capture card. A VGA-to-DVI cable is connected between the source computer and the Datapath capture card to enable video capturing. Audio capture was done by feeding a 3.5mm stereo jack cable from the sound card of the vintage computer to the capture system’s on-board line in connector. Resizing/upscaling of the raw original 640x480 capture to 3200x2400 was done using VirtualDub2.

0:00 - Monorail
1:48 - Train
3:24 - Boat
6:57 - Truck
8:49 - Helicopter

#atrain #artdink #A列車で行こう #A5 #windows95 #powervr #pcx1 #soundblaster #awe32 #pentiumpro #200mhz #shadowvolumes #realtimeshadows #stencilshadows (but not really) #upscaling #datapath #periodcorrect #dynamicshadows #selfshadowing a ressha de ikou 5