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My family always called the object in your picture a spiral. That seems to be what the Stunts manual calls it as well.

Cool! Nice job!  I downloaded your test track, I'll add it to my collection 

Looks like the 4D Sports Driving box had screenshots that look like the final product.

https://images.launchbox-app.com/0ac96e24-796d-4142-b83f-2825cf913353.jpg

I also thought the middle picture looks weird! There's a bunch of things that look weird to me about it but I can explain them away:

-There is a lot of track that is up in the air but there are no strut supports shown, so there is just a ton of track suspended in the sky! However these suspended track pieces seem to be an elevated curve and a spiral, and in the final game, neither of these track pieces have struts under them, so they would also appear suspended in the air.

-The grass is a similar light green to that used on the top of hills in the final game and the horizon almost seems to hit the grass before the elevated track pieces appear, suggesting that the elevated pieces are placed on lower ground near the hill. This makes it seem like the player car is on top of a hill and somehow the elevated turn and spiral are even higher than the hill without themselves resting on it (it feels like they are suspended twice as high as they should be).  However, I think the light green grass in this screenshot is just a color difference from taking the picture with a camera, and there is nothing to conclusively say that the player car is on top of a hill. I also think it is just camera angle and perspective that makes the elevated curve and spiral seem to be at a higher than normal elevation.

-It kind of looks like the elevated turn and the spiral are placed at a 45 degree angle to where the player car is, which wouldn't be possible with the track editor the final game has.  However, I think the player car is on one of those flat ground track pieces that takes up 4 terrain blocks and briefly goes at a 45 degree angle.


Regarding the boxy walls on the jumps in the proto screenshot, maybe the added polygons needed to do the boxes dipped performance too much so it was just an optimization choice to make them paper thin. On the other hand, that's probably not right, as when you place a straight track on the edge of a hill (so it is inclined), it has boxy guardrails on it.  I always thought it was interesting how you can drive right through those boxy guardrails without crashing, while hitting every other track piece that has a guardrail or wall will result in a crash.

Looks like I had Stunts 1.1  I remember being able to crash into the roof of tunnels, having opponent tracks, and driving on top of tunnels, which seem to be features that weren't in 1.0  My retail copy said "Stunts" all over it rather than "4D Sports Driving" and was published by Broderbund.

I was looking at the back of my Stunts retail box today and noticed that basically every image on the back had some notable differences to how that image would look in the final game.  Here's a picture showing comparisons.

https://imgur.com/a/sqVoiwG


And while I'm at it, what's up with the jumps on the main menu having red ropes instead of purple ropes

I don't know which version of DOS Stunts I have on disks (the version I currently have installed is off the internet), but growing up, my retail copy would always lock up when the timer flipped to 10 minutes.  It didn't bother me that much at the time because almost all tracks I designed and the stock tracks could be easily completed in under 10 minutes. I'd only ever reach 10 minutes if I was fooling around or had made a very convoluted track that wasn't much fun to play anyway.  I just figured that the game designers never thought anyone would race on one track for more than 10 minutes.

I'd actually never heard of the pop up screen asking if I wanted to continue racing until seeing this topic just now.

Too bad we can't stitch multiple stunts maps together for purposes of playing a gigantic track.

Needs just a little more Stunts art on the cabinet maybe.

I'd consider re-skinning it if high resolution Stunts art existed!  Maybe you can make some for me

Back in the 90s I tried playing stunts with a typical flight style joystick, I also tried using the gravis gamepad, both experiences were very lackluster. The wheel is much better

Thanks!  I've just downloaded several of your tracks and will give them a shot!

I can't believe you have a wheel and have not tried it with stunts yet!  The steering adjusts gradually with the turning of the wheel, that's what I mean that it is analogue steering. Please give it a try and let me know what you think   The joystick configuration does not save when you exit stunts, so you would have to reconfigure it every time you start it up.  To get around this, I configured the joystick and got through the manual copy protection, and then took a save state in dosbox that I load on each startup so I'm configured and ready to go at the press of a button.

I think the tilting on Radmobile might just be mechanical rather than the machine receiving instructions from the software. In that case, it might be fairly simple to adapt stunts into such a machine and keeping the rotating element without needing to write any custom software. This video gives some clues about the mechanism:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fvGlD5e3KM

Thanks, it was a dream I've had for a long time to do an arcade cabinet for racing games.  I put all the old arcade games on it like Outrun and Cruisin' USA and had fun with that for awhile, and then I decided to expand it to basically any old racing game that I have ever enjoyed so I added some PC and console stuff.  Stunts was kind of an afterthought, and one of the oldest games I have on the machine, but it is quite fun to play it with analogue steering via the wheel.  In fact, I would say having the ability to control the steering with the wheel makes it MUCH easier to take flat turns at a good speed without steering into a skid. 

The wheel is actually a Thrustmaster T2, which was one of the first PC analogue wheels mass produced in the 1990s. It was natively supported by a lot of Dos games.  These days I luckily don't need to worry about things like special drivers, as I can use adapters to get it recognized by windows as a generic analogue joystick, and from there, map it to basically any emulator, including dosbox.

Although the steering in Stunts is analogue, it seems that the throttle and brake are still read as a digital signal when using a joystick. The throttle and brake are just 100% ON or OFF when I press a pedal rather than giving me 25% or 50% of throttle the further I put the pedal down.

I tried to put Street Rod 2 on this as well for laughs, but unfortunately that game only provides digital steering, which makes it basically impossible to play with an analogue wheel as it is impossible to keep the car going in a straight line (the car will steer 100% left or right if the wheel is even just a few degrees off center).

The most recent game I have on the machine is probably Need for Speed Carbon, circa 2005, emulated with a gamecube emulator.  It's quite a difference to go from a post 2000, high polygon, texture mapped game with fancy particles and lighting to Stunts!

Here are some pictures of the arcade cab. 

By the way folks, as a kid I discovered you could easily clip yourself onto the divided highway elevated grass and trees area just by driving at the point at a slow speed.  I searched the forum but didn't see anyone else talk about this, so I'm uploading a replay just in case this is groundbreaking new stuff for the community (I don't suppose it would help anyone trying to get a faster time).