Cars without speedometer. Is this normal?

[CYBERYOGI -CO-Windler]

I installed "Stunts" on the Win98SE mainboard of my dual-PC case, and discovered that many original cars (nothing modded) seem to lack a speedometer but only have the RPM gauge. Is this normal or a nasty surprise by ancient disc protection when I fail to reply the security questions correctly?

I heard that real racing drivers think in terms of RPM and gears instead of looking at the speedometer, but for stunt jumps its the the actual speed that matters, because it controls the distance at that you will land or crash. In "Race Drivin" (arcade version on MAME) it is next to impossible to live without speedometer, because e.g. above 40 MPH it makes you for sure plummet down the cliff at sharp turns, or let you fly to far over ramps and smash to pieces.

Also in "Stunts" I tried a row of jump bridges, those will make you fly to far and fall into the gap when driving too fast.

- Is the absent speedometer a bug or a feature?

[Cas]

Some original cars indeed have no speed-o-meter. In my opinion, this follows the intention of making the car dashboards look faithful to the those of the real cars, nothing more. It's true that, within a game like Stunts, it's always good to be able to monitor the speed, but because the original cars are based on real cars, look is favoured over comfort there. The IMSA cars, for instance, have no speed-o-meter.

[Overdrijf]

The good news is: in Stunts the jump length is based on speed and launching angle, but also on the length of the car*. So you'll need to set your expectations of jump length using the specific car you're driving anyway. The same things goes for for instance sliding out of corners, that speed is different per car, so you can learn to spot that point from either the speedometer or the rpm'eter.

Now, the advantage of using the speedometer is that you don't need to know in which gear you are, a car going 100 mph looks the same on the speedometer regardless of what gear you're in. So for that reason you might want to use the speedometer. But I think learning your reference points compared to the RPM has an even bigger inherent advantage: RPM's are tied to the sound your car makes.

When driving a real car you spend most of your time looking out the windshield, not at your meters. It's the same here. You want to use the sound to know whether you're going to make the jump or not, or whether you're going to slide out of the turn. "100 mph" does not make a specific sound, but "just below the top of 3rd gear" does, as long as you know you're in 3rd gear.

I kind of assume that's the actual reason why in real racing cars the rpm'eter is more prominent than the speedometer, or the speedometer can even be absent. The makers of Stunts just imitated the look of those cars, but the same logic applies, so those cars still drive fine without a speedometer.

(My DAF is probably the main exception, the RPM'eter is fake, but the speed is tied 1:1 with how fast your car is going, because there's only 1 gear. Actually, my 250cc Superkart might be the second most prominent exception, because you have to shift so fast that you lose track of which of the 6 gears you're in. But for other cars: I feel like learning to drive on the sound, supported by the rpm'eter, is typically the way to go.)

*= And a bit of randomness/sub-frame timing, it matters when your first "tick" of falling is when you've just left the ramp or when you're about one car length away from it.



Also: hi. I don't think I saw/responded to you yet.