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This footage from A5 (Version 1.0.0 compiled on December 20th 1996) shows off the railway building system in the game briefly along with a demonstration of a working monorail connection on said railway. The route building system (for rail, road, sea and air) is fairly flexible in A5, especially when used in a high resolution screen mode like 1024x768 and above. Note, however, that it becomes quite difficult to make fine adjustments and to click on rails that you want to edit when the resolution goes above 800x600 (because the 2D view graphics become smaller), hence why I used 800x600 in this video. It's an entirely mouse-driven affair where single clicking locks down one section of planned track, right-clicking undoes one track section and double clicking builds all of the sections of track the player has "drawn" in the building session. Couldn't have been easier unless A5 was still an isometric 2D game.

A5 also has surprisingly advanced audio for its time (especially good with headphones)! The audio features include a doppler effect on vehicles passing by, as well as binaural positional 3D audio which accounts for visualizing sound source positions both around the camera's "virtual ears" and also above and below (with elevation filtering)! This is HRTF simulation done before Aureal's A3D made its debut on home consumer PC hardware in Spring 1997 and it sounds really convincing with helicopters buzzing above and trucks or busses rumbling below a slightly elevated camera view. You can pin-point where the vehicles are relative to your ears with your eyes closed!

I have only started playing the game and a lot of things are as such left unexpanded from the starting map layout. This is because I find the experience to be quite zen-like even without touching the starting parameters at all!

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

Drivers used for the NEC PC 3DEngine card: 1.0.0c1.
Drivers used for the S3 Trio64V+ card: Default Win95 OSR 2.1 drivers.
The game uses the SGL (Super Graphics Library) API for native PowerVR 3D acceleration.

A Ressha De Ikou 5 by Artdink (1996)
#windows95 #atrain #powervr #hrtf #binaural