A5: A-Train 5/A列車で行こう5 (PowerVR version) - Monorail ride and Bus drive in automatic 3D Ride Mode
Here is some more footage of A5 (Version 1.0.0 compiled on December 20th 1996) demonstrating the automatic 3D ride mode in the game, using the monorail and bus as examples. The soundtrack playing during the ride is being played straight from the game CD-ROM disc in Redbook format. Each vehicle type has its own track associated with it. When the track finishes playing it looks back to the start until the player right-clicks to cancel out of ride mode. The graphics API used for the game's 3D graphics is SGL.
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
A Ressha De Ikou 5 by Artdink (1996)
#windows95 #atrain #powervr #hrtf #binaural