Chase H.Q., small glitch.

[Neville]

After "Cabal" I found another old game with graphical glitches, although less annoying. "Chase H.Q." shows a glitch in the sky, but only at the beginning of a stage. Here's a pic.

 

 

Edited February 1, 2021 by Neville

[Tux]

Which stage ? Probably not the 1st ? I have other matters to deal with for now anyway so I don't think I'll have the time for it now...

[Neville]

I've seen the glitch on 1st and 2nd stages so far. It's not a big deal because it seems to disappear after a while.

[Tux]

Funny that I don't even remember seeing that, but I admit I didn't play this one a lot, very rarely actually. I might take a look later but these car games are usually quite complex... but it might be a trivial layer alignment problem. Anyway I have my mind on something else, so there won't be any new release for a while now...

I had a not so quick look, it's related to line scroll (which is used to scroll some lines compared to others in the layer), it displays a part of the layer which is simply empty, no data there, appears all black. Why is it empty ? Good question ! No idea for now, it shouldn't happen !

End for now !

Edited February 2, 2021 by Tux

[Tux]

Finally found it, and fixed it.

If you want to know the story behind this : it's a very old hack which was added by Antiriad to compensate the fact that we didn't have any linescroll in the emulator.
At the time he even said it was impossible to add some linescroll in raine without rewriting too many things.
Well I found a way to add it anyway, but with some real linescroll his hack is creating these black areas on the left and on the right of the screen, I just removed it and now it works flawlessly.
There was also another problem creating black lines at the top of the screen when the car was going up or down on a slope, this one was a bad optimization from me, it was less noticeable than the black areas anyway but still annoying, fixed it too.
Now the clouds still look strange compared to mame, so I guess there is some decoding difference of the sprites somewhere, but I didn't try to fix that, the clouds are not bad actually, it's called "ciel de traine" in french ! Maybe it will have to be fixed for something else than these clouds one day, but the clouds are ok anyway !

By the way this is again some very old driver which was not touched in years... and that's the reason it had a problem, it had become somewhat incompatible with some other part of the emulator... !

By the way this driver would probably need some more love : the controls are very hard on the keyboard, the accelerator and the brake are going from nothing to max immediately, same thing for steering wheel, it would probably need to be improved. This can be used with analog controls though, by assigning some real joystick controls there, I didn't do it in years but it should normally still work, but the controls could be improved with only a keyboard... Also I quite like what mame added there to show which speed is on (low or high), they added a graphic overlay to show it, quite nice, in raine there is a message at the bottom of the screen which can easily be missed, I'd suggest changing at least the osd options here to have the text on solid black background to make it more visible !

Edited February 4, 2021 by Tux

[Tux]

For info there was another bug related to this for "continental circus", the top of the mountain was off by a large amount during the intro demo, alignment problem obviously but which was never reported or found before now, it's fixed too. (the game shares exactly the same hardware).