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This is a demonstration capture of me building various establishments in A5 (Version 1.0.0 compiled on December 20th 1996). The 2D view is used to manipulate the orientation and location of the structure and the 3D view comes in handy when demoing the visual impact your structure has on the terrain and/or the urban aesthetics. The desktop/UI resolution (800x600) could have been a little higher but my 2MB Trio64V+ card limits the maximum potential 3D view window size at 1024x768 and the image quality is generally not that good from that card, hence the lower resolution. Will have to test the game out on a 4MB video card at some point.

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