Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge #AtariSTe

It's finally here, folks!!

After months in development, the time has now come to ditch your PC and dust off the old Atari. Yes, a public release of the Atari STe upgraded Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge will be available to download from tomorrow - April 10th. The only caveat is that your computer requires 1MB Ram and a working floppy disk drive. Surely nothing too drastic to ask?

The original plan was to update Lotus with all the features missing from the original ST release. Jon added sky rasters, revamped roadside details and boosted the framerate. He later used the Blitter Chip to crunch those car sprites and smoothly scroll the landscape which delivered even more speed. Jamie Hamshere worked on the DMA audio to ditch the horrendous chip effects. As you can imagine, the end result of all this effort is quite staggering.

I'd like to thank Jon for all his hard work and for sharing with me everything that he was working on over the months. It's been great to follow, a fascinating experience and tons of fun. I would like to thank Jamie & Masteries for their incredible DMA skills; I'll never forget the first time I played Lotus with sampled sound effects alongside the chip music.

Downloads will be available from tomorrow morning via AtariMania. Well, that's my weekend sorted...

One day I'll get myself a sports car and I'll live the game for real. One day...

Did you know?

The new Lotus Esprit actually works on the Atari ST and features nice sky rasters, faster gameplay and more. The only caveat is the requirement of 1MB Ram and also a Blitter Chip (check the Options menu in GEM if you're unsure!). All Mega STs meet these requirements and late-model STFM's have an empty socket... Feeling tempted to upgrade?

Worried that you don't have a working floppy disk at hand? Well, the download is compatible with floppy disk replacements and can also run off a hard drive/ultrasatan using programs like Floppy Image Runner. Check that out!

The 16MHz Mega STe can run Lotus at dizzy speeds - just hold down the SHIFT key at bootup to activate it. Also, if you're missing the peculiar YM sound effects then press the ALT key at bootup to disable the cool DMA samples.

Finally, if you have extra hardware connected to your Atari STe, like hard drives, then disconnect and power them off. Do not try leaving the hard drive on and attempting to bypass that auto-booting. Power it off and cold boot the computer.

Check it out, I made the high score table. Honest, I swear I did... ahem!!

Preview Release Timeline Updates (for reference)

I've made a few video recordings to flaunt the features of each release. All credit to Jonathan Thomas, Jamie Hamshere & Masteries (DMA audio) for all their hard work with each new release. Don't worry, the fantastic chip music remains as an option and the STe's DMA playback has no negative effect on the framerate. Great work lads, keep it up!!

For reference, here are the links from each development build I have received:

Apr 10th - It's finally here to download from AtariMania!!
Mar 31st - video #6 Player two has sky gradient, Blitter scrolls the landscape per pixel, more audio refinements and a higher framerate!
Mar 28th - video #5 Portugal track (audio sample for the intro and many improvements made to the volume balance of YM/DMA.
Mar 21st - video #4 Practice track with a massive change to the audio. Lotus can play play DMA sound effect samples alongside the glorious Ben Daglish chip music!!! Volume refinements to come thanks to Jamie...
Mar  7th - video #3 Iceland track (DMA sfx).
Feb 28th - video #2 Mexico track (chip music).
Feb 21st - video #1 Italy track (chip sound effects).
Feb 21st - website feature with information, specs, photos, etc.. :-)
Dec 24th - Jon posted on Atari-Forum about his Lotus plan!