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Do you remember how fast
Wipeout
was in 1995? It's just as fast now. You, however, may not be as fast. Just saying. (credit: Psygnosis / Dominic Szablewski)
There have been a lot of
Wipeout
games released since the 1995 original, including
Wipeout HD
and the
Omega Collection
, but only the original has the distinction of having
its Windows port source code leaked
by (
since defunct
) archive Forest of Illusion.
Dominic Szablewski grabbed that code before it disappeared and set about creating a version that’s not just a port. He rewrote the game’s rendering, physics, sound, and generally “everything everywhere.” He
documented the project
, put
his code on GitHub
, and has some version of a justification. “So let's just pretend that the leak was intentional, a
rewrite
of the source falls under fair use and the whole thing is abandonware anyway,” Szablewski writes.
Most of the code seemed to come from
Wipeout ATI 3D Rage Edition
, a “lackluster port for Windows” that was bundled with ATI GPUs, Szablewski wrote. It is a mess. There are fragments of code versions from DOS, PlayStation, Windows 95, and Windows 98, with lots of things shakily patched in, including some kludgey 25-to-30 frames-per-second physics calculations in moving from European PAL to North American NTSC. The result was bad geometry, sluggish performance, and even goofed text rendering.