Race Drivin' Update

Hi! I have released a new Patreon exclusive work in progress patch of Race Drivin'. This patch contains several improvements and fixes compared to the first beta version and it's very likely to be a release candidate, with future changes being related to performance and bug fixes.

The download link is available under the attachments of this post. If you don't know how to apply BPS patches, check out https://sneslab.net/wiki/How_to_apply_ROM_patches 

Change log compared to the first version, available at https://www.patreon.com/posts/test-now-work-in-47408969:

• Improved the engine simulation, in particular the way the RPM (rotations per minute) works and interacts with the car speed.
• Unlike the original game, reducing the gearbox will reduce the car speed.
• Made the car engine noise sound always directly proportional as the current RPM value, unlike the original game that was more tied to the current car speed.
• Reduced the acceleration rate, because the original game allowed to accelerate too much quickly, even quicker as breaking.
• Fixed the replay flickering, because it does not work with delta-based frame control, since the recorded frames already uses it.
• Made the replay length 8x longer, since the game runs way faster now.
• Fixed the Autocross Track, which was not working on the first version, because the track records the car movements for creating a shadow, which uses way more memory than the amount I have allocated to the SA-1 chip (32 KB).
• Made the car sprites do not run so fast on the Stunt Track.
• Added several mathematical optimizations, by using optimized algorithms.
• Moved the direct page area from the BW-RAM (from 5.37 MHz) to I-RAM (10.74 MHz), accelerating DP memory intensive routines. This makes Race Drivin' the second game to use I-RAM aggressively just like Super Mario World (SA-1 Pack only).

Known issues:

• The title screen demo is broken. Reason: This will be fixed once the final and public version is out, because the demo needs to be adjusted to work with the new internal speed of the game. Since there can be still performance changes, I will make sure to only update the demo when I have sure the performance characteristics of the game will not change at all.
• Some parts of the game will not render correctly. In particular, some ramps when the car is on a low speed (normally lower than 60 mph) and part of the hot wheels on the Super Stunt Track. Reason: This is because of the limitations of the game rendering engine on some angular position that will take more research time and it's not the focus of the patch at the moment.

If you find any issue not listed above, please let me know!

Have fun!