Outrun Coast 2 Coast - 3 Player LAN (PC) - 15 Stage continuous (OR2 tracks)
35The intro before the video pretty much explains it all, but here’s some wireless 3 player Outrun 2006 coast 2 Coast LAN action on the PC. The title of the video is a little bit of a misnomer because although it does indeed start as a 3 player racer, it doesn't stay as one for long...
I’ve uploaded a few videos before of some two player PC LAN games, and doing this is a lot less stable than the original Xbox system link games I’ve also uploaded. The other player’s car (in the previous two player PC videos) would have a tendency to disappear and re-appear at random on the opposing players screen and would also seem to pinball all over the screen. In at least one of the previous two player link games, the link got broken at one point which basically turned half of that particular run into two separate 1 player games. The timers also had a strange habit of getting out of sync, leading to the odd situation where one player could run out of time, but the other would still be playing (normally the other player's timer should be in sync with the race leader - when they go through a checkpoint, everyone’s time should increase accordingly, stay the same and stay in sync). I guessed that adding an extra player into the mix for three player games would probably make stuff more unstable but, I thought let’s give it a try…
My Bartop MAME cabinet (The Al-Cade) has an old Dell PC inside that doesn’t have a GPU, but even so it’s still able to run Outrun Coast 2 Coast at 30 fps on the absolute lowest graphical settings. I wasn’t sure if adding FRAPs video capture in as well might be too much for it. It seemed to, mostly handle it OK, however on more than one occasion, my screen suddenly went blank for a split-second and the recording stopped, and I'd see some error message pop up about Direct 3D error blah blah. This would then normally result in me either frantically careening all over the road whilst I desperately tried to get the recording going again, or just outright crashing.
In this particular game it also happened to Player 3 as well, fairly early into the game, only his screen went blank and didn't come back on (although it turned out his screen was still recording when I checked the footage later). I think this was a weird by-product of using the FXT mod (which gives the game FFB effects, sorts out the steering wheel deadzone and lots of other cool stuff). Despite the appearance of being full screen, with FXT active the game is actually windowed (in order for the arcade style overlays and new game icons to work) and I think what simply happened was that the screen saver on player 3's PC activated. Ooooops... at the time I was worried the whole PC might've died and I was shouting advice across to him, whilst still trying to play the game and not crash. I didn't think to say, 'just try giving the mouse a little wiggle'.
In all the other 3 PC link up games we tried, P3 would always de-sync towards the end of the second stage and end up on totally different course to myself and P2. Oddly though, despite this, the timer would re-sync and start a 10 second countdown on both of the other two PCs once the goal had been reached by the winner. So yeah, it was fun to try out, but there are definitely a lot of bugs. I don’t know if a wired LAN would still have all these networking issues…?
I really should give the Xbox 3 Player setup I demonstrated here another try at some point...
https://youtu.be/UY1nePGStlI
Other Videos By MrThunderwing
Other Statistics
OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast Statistics For MrThunderwing
MrThunderwing presently has 140,805 views for OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast across 25 videos, with approximately 3 hours of OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast video on his channel. This is 1.41% of the total watchable video on MrThunderwing's YouTube channel.