Stunt Race FX (Game Boy, Unofficial Tech Demo) Demonstration - NintendoComplete

A demonstration of Elmar Krieger's tech demo for the Nintendo Game Boy, Stunt Race FX.

It runs on real Game Boy hardware. The demo comes in the form of a four megabit rom, and it can be run from a real system using a flashcart.

I searched around for information on how this genius bit of coding came to be, but I found little save for a few random Reddit posts and a link to the rom. If you'd like to give it a try, you can find it at http://kigb.emuunlim.com/downloads.htm

Like the splash screen says, there's not really any gameplay here, but the visual spectacle that this demo provides more than makes up for that. I'm not a programmer, but it hardly takes one to recognize how impressive this is! Considering it's the Game Boy, I think it's probably unlikely that this is rendering polygons at this speed - maybe some sort of vector-based prerender voodoo is driving things along? Raycasting?

Whatever it is, it's well ahead of 99% of what was released during the system's commercial life. Race Drivin' and X, both developed by Argonaut (the guys behind the Super FX chip and Star Fox), were probably the system's most impressive achievements back in the day, but this demo manages to edge out even those. This looks cleaner and animates more smoothly than even most SNES racing games.

I wonder if this was only ever meant to be a demo. I'd love to see what might be done with these methods in a fully fleshed out game. The first thing that came to mind when I saw it was how the Game Boy could've handled a Phantasy Star conversion that one-upped the Master System original, or even better yet, a port of Arcana with fully animated scrolling in the dungeons!

*Recorded using the DMG shader in Retroarch to mimic the look of the original hardware.
_____________
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

NintendoComplete (http://www.nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!