Motor City Online

Oh, boy. Now this is a game I re­al­ly nev­er played un­til a cou­ple of days ago. Mo­tor City On­line, orig­i­nal­ly des­tined to be the next NFS af­ter NFS5 (Porsche), but in­stead they made an on­line MMO with­out the NFS ti­tle in 2001. At that time I didn't know about the game, I prob­a­bly didn't have an in­ter­net con­nec­tion fast enough, I'm not a fan of mus­cle cars, some­where I read it was US on­ly, and it al­so had a $10 month­ly sub­scrip­tion fee (around $18 in 2024!)... hell would freeze over be­fore I'd even con­sid­er it. Any­way, many peo­ple con­sid­er it as an NFS game, so I put it in­to the NFS se­ries too, but with­out giv­ing it a num­ber.

The servers were shut down not even two years af­ter re­lease in 2003, turn­ing every copy of the game in­to an ex­pen­sive pa­per­weight. Or did it? Ac­tu­al­ly some­one found a way to get in­to a hid­den de­bug mode of some be­ta ver­sion of the game, where you can play against AI op­po­nents. But be­fore we go in­to de­tails, the in­tro!

Well... what I think the in­tro is. The prob­lem is, in the cur­rent ver­sion of the avail­able game, you can't see it. I got the video files from the game, and transcod­ed them with FFmpeg, just like how I did in­tro videos for pre­vi­ous NFS games. Two files, hav­ing an­oth­er weird ass res­o­lu­tion of 384x288 (still 4:3), but fi­nal­ly 30 FPS in­stead of 15! And the sec­ond video is let­ter­boxed, from some­thing like 384x181. (The height of non-black pix­els are 182, but the top and bot­tom row are dark­er, so it's more like a 181 height video with a non-in­te­ger off­set.) But un­like with NFS3, it's re­al let­ter­box, so I cropped it away from the video above.

About the ac­tu­al con­tents of the video, all I'm go­ing to say is: brand-new EA lo­go again! About the rest, un­for­tu­nate­ly the re­al game is not playable any­more, and I don't want to com­pare it to some de­bug build based hack.

Technical shit#

I'm flip­ping the usu­al or­der, and I'm start­ing with the bad news. Un­like oth­er NFS games of the era, this one has no mod­ern patch, and get­ting it run on any­thing mod­ern can be tricky. These are the con­figs I tried and didn't work: Wine and VirtualBox. Un­der Wine, I tried mul­ti­ple Wine ver­sions, with and with­out DXVK, with and with­out dgVoodoo2, the re­sults were all the same: an er­ror mes­sage telling I don't have HW ac­cel­er­a­tion and it re­fus­es to start. I al­so tried it un­der a Win7 VM in VirtualBox, there it sim­ply crashed—but VirtualBox's VGA em­u­la­tion is pret­ty crap, so I'm not too sur­prised with the re­sult. So where does it work? On a re­al wang­blows, even on Win10. Maybe you can get it run­ning un­der PCem, but the min­i­mum sys­tem re­quire­ments state a 350 MHz CPU, which is a bit too much for PCem. Al­so, when I tried NFS5 in PCem, the graph­ics were su­per bug­gy...

I've tried two Win­dows ma­chines, first a Win10 LTSC with some crap AMD video card and GPU passthrough. It works, but dur­ing race I don't get more than 30–40 FPS, even in 800x600 res­o­lu­tion. Dur­ing the game, task man­ag­er re­ports al­most 100% GPU us­age, which is re­al­ly weird, be­cause FurMark can eas­i­ly do 120+ FPS in Full-HD res­o­lu­tion with the same card, and it's sup­posed to be or­ders of mag­ni­tude more com­pu­ta­tion­al­ly ex­pen­sive. But this VM has oth­er prob­lems too, if I try any kind of screen cap­tur­ing, it'll crawl down to a slideshow, but try­ing the same with a Lin­ux VM works per­fect­ly. Ei­ther the LTSC Win­dows is bro­ken some­how, or the mon­keys at AMD still can't write a dri­ver.

The sec­ond op­tion I tried was my old lap­top, halfway in­to the trash, hav­ing a not up­dat­ed in ages Win8.1 with some GeForce 960M. It worked there too, and un­like with the GPU passthrough op­tion, it ac­tu­al­ly man­ages to reach 60 FPS most of the time (there are still a lot of frame rate drops, but still works much bet­ter). And by the way, there's this LGR video on JewTube where he al­so bitch­es about how the game runs like shit on a re­al WinXP ma­chine with HW from around the game's era... so yeah, don't be sur­prised if it will run like crap.

On how to get the game ac­tu­al­ly, I rec­om­mend you find­ing the game's MyAbandonware.com site, where you can down­load al­so the game ISO, not just the up­dates, like from the PCGW page. The in­stal­la­tion it­self is pret­ty straight­for­ward on wang­blows, just fol­low the in­struc­tions (but ig­nore the notes). When done, you should be able to launch MCity_Launcher.exe, and end up with this glo­ri­ous launch­er (or some­thing like this, de­pend­ing on your wang­blows theme):

JXL PNG

Not ex­act­ly eye can­dy, eh? First time you should just click on Go and check if the game launch­es at all. It will ask if you want it to be launched in fullscreen or not, take care, it will on­ly ask it once. If you want to change it af­ter­ward, you have to open SaveData/options.ini, and set the windowed= pa­ra­me­ter. Al­so, on the first start­up it's pos­si­ble you will on­ly get a black screen un­til the game loads, do not pan­ic if noth­ing hap­pens at first, wait at least a minute be­fore pan­ick­ing, this game loads pret­ty slow, even on mod­ern HW. On sub­se­quent star­tups, you should get a load­ing screen with a progress bar...

Next is how to get any­thing oth­er than 800x600 res­o­lu­tion. The 3D set­up has a res­o­lu­tion se­lec­tor, but se­lect­ing oth­er res­o­lu­tion doesn't seem to do any­thing. What worked for me is us­ing dgVoodoo2 and force it to a dif­fer­ent res­o­lu­tion (plus on new­er Win­dows ver­sions, the DX11/12 based dgVoodoo2 might work bet­ter than DX8). I used the lat­est avail­able ver­sion of dgVoodoo2 at the time of writ­ing, 2.83.2. First on the VM I've got many miss­ing tex­tures and sol­id filled ob­jects, but af­ter a GPU dri­ver up­date and re­boot it fixed. The dgVoodoo2 man­u­al men­tions this as a bug in cer­tain AMD dri­vers, switch­ing to DX12 back­end can al­so work. On my lap­top, it worked fine from the get-go.

How­ev­er, res­o­lu­tion se­lec­tion in dgVoodoo2 is less than ob­vi­ous, and you have to read the doc­u­men­ta­tion re­al­ly care­ful­ly to fig­ure out what it does. What I did first is I se­lect­ed Stretched, keep As­pect Ra­tio un­der Scal­ing mode (Gen­er­al tab) and se­lect­ed Desk­top un­der Res­o­lu­tion (DirectX tab), launched the game... and end­ed up with a stretched dis­play. Um, thanks? I se­lect­ed keep as­pect ra­tio?! ... The prob­lem is, dgVoodoo2 doesn't work like that. What you se­lect un­der Res­o­lu­tion is the res­o­lu­tion of the frame­buffer the game will ren­der to—i.e. NDC–pix­el map­ping will be stretched. What Scal­ing mode sets is what should dgVoodoo2 do when the frame­buffer's res­o­lu­tion doesn't match your screen's res­o­lu­tion. So you shouldn't se­lect Desk­top un­der Res­o­lu­tion, nei­ther type in your widescreen res­o­lu­tion. You can ei­ther cal­cu­late the 4:3 res­o­lu­tion man­u­al­ly, or se­lect Max, which means, a bit un­in­tu­itive­ly, the maximum res­o­lu­tion that fits your desk­top res­o­lu­tion while keep­ing as­pect ra­tio (if you se­lect­ed keep As­pect ra­tio un­der Scal­ing mode). If you se­lect Un­forced here while se­lect­ing Stretched, keep As­pect Ra­tio, it will mean to ren­der the game in its orig­i­nal res­o­lu­tion, but then let dgVoodoo2 rescale it to your screen's res­o­lu­tion in­stead of the GPU/screen do­ing it. As such, I ac­tu­al­ly rec­om­mend you se­lect­ing Cen­tered, keep As­pect ra­tio un­der Scal­ing mode, so if you mess up your Res­o­lu­tion se­lec­tion, at least it will be eas­i­ly no­tice­able. (Cen­tered, Stretched with­out the keep As­pect ra­tio bit means leave scal­ing to your dis­play, which usu­al­ly won't work (es­pe­cial­ly if the se­lect­ed 4:3 res­o­lu­tion is not sup­port­ed by the dis­play).)

And some ran­dom chat­ter if you want to use a DS4 con­troller on Win8.1. The lat­est ver­sion of DS4Windows of­fi­cial­ly sup­port­ing Win8.1 is 2.2.6 (for bonus points, try to find this huge break­ing change in 2.2.7's changel­og with­out Ctrl-F... yes, a fuck­ing patch re­lease). If you want to bind L2/R2 to break/ac­cel­er­ate, you'll run in­to a sim­i­lar is­sue than in NFS3: they are both an ax­is and a but­ton, and but­ton takes prece­dence in the bind­ing screen. Ac­tu­al­ly, it's worse than NFS3, since the press the trig­ger a lit­tle bit then try to bind trick doesn't work. Search­ing the net for a so­lu­tion con­firmed DS4Windows de­vel­op­er is a lit­er­al re­tard. Kere­ouha pro­vides a list of bro­ken games, the re­sponse?

Still have not found a com­plete­ly need­ed use case yet.

Then a bit lat­er, when that re­tard fi­nal­ly gets to the point of try­ing a rac­ing game, he re­al­izes that his piece of shit soft­ware is in­deed un­us­able garbage, and fi­nal­ly man­ages to fix it. Ex­cept it's 2023 Sep­tem­ber, so on­ly for the Bot­net 10 ver­sion. And no, I don't want to spend one week try­ing to get a vi­su­al­shit stu­dio work­ing to com­pile this crap. So in the end I just went with re­bind­ing L2/R2 to left thumb up/down (while un­bind­ing LT up/down), it fix­es the is­sue kin­da. No sep­a­rate brake/ac­cel­er­ate ax­is though. Al­so, this is NFS4 en­gine, not NFS5, so if you start the game with­out the con­troller con­nect­ed just once, it will for­get the set­tings and you'll have to re­do con­troller bind­ings.

Gameplay#

This game is sup­posed to be run­ning on a mod­i­fied NFS4 en­gine, and I can see it. The con­troller han­dling men­tioned above and col­li­sion han­dling feels very sim­i­lar. What is not sim­i­lar is the han­dling of cars, but it's prob­a­bly due to this game on­ly hav­ing mus­cle cars, heavy shits with ridicu­lous­ly over­pow­ered en­gines, with brakes tak­en out of a Fi­at 500. And as we all know, mo­men­tum equals mass times ve­loc­i­ty, and when both of them are huge... god help you if you want any­thing oth­er than go­ing straight. And this game doesn't go easy on you, the tracks look like they were de­signed to pun­ish you to the ex­tent pos­si­ble when you hap­pen to slide off the road. With the lat­est up­date, the game got two Japan­ese cars ('96 Toy­ota Supra and '97 Mit­subishi Eclipse Spy­der GS-T), I tried them... and it looks like they for­got to in­clude steer­ing wheels in these cars. They some­how have worse ma­neu­ver­abil­i­ty than the over­weight mus­cle shits.

The orig­i­nal game had a lot of cus­tomiza­tion op­tions, and a kind of small econ­o­my, they're all gone. You can on­ly se­lect stock cars and a few ran­dom pre­set paintjob. On the oth­er hand, I'm glad I can try this of­fline, and don't have to deal with peo­ple.

The sound­track... I don't like it ei­ther. If you have Amer­i­can cars from '30s to '70s, you need a match­ing sound­track, right? Yeah, ex­act­ly what you got. Some kind of rock-coun­try mix. Not a fan of them.

Load times are ridicu­lous­ly long (but so does with NFS4, and NFS3 with­out mod­ern patch), and you still start from the last place on every race. Not sure if this is a launch­er fea­ture, or it was in the main game too, but you can have an odd num­ber of laps here too. AI is as stu­pid as in NFS4, or maybe even worse, and they're all over the place. I on­ly tried the Hard dif­fi­cul­ty set­ting, some­times they can give you a hard time, but in many cas­es they'll make a stu­pid mis­take and fall be­hind. But I guess they didn't fine tune the AI, as it was sup­posed to be an on­line-on­ly game, so I'll give this a pass.

Tracks is about the on­ly part I liked, too bad they nev­er port­ed them to any oth­er rac­ing game. Looks on­ly Amer­i­ca, but has rur­al and city tracks, with some in­ter­est­ing new fea­tures, like pedes­tri­ans! I don't think any NFS game had pedes­tri­ans. You can't hit them though, they'll jump away. It al­so has point-to-point races (even though most of them are just a small­er sec­tion of a longer track), but the im­ple­men­ta­tion is a bit... weird. You can have more than one "lap" on a point-to-point track. Go­ing from the start to the end is one lap. Then you have to turn around, and go back to com­plete the sec­ond lap. Weird. I'd say it's some weird fea­ture of the launch­er, but the game even has peo­ple wav­ing turn around flags—some­one had to code this and cre­ate as­sets.

For your san­i­ty I set the num­ber of laps to one here.

Sor­ry for the crap qual­i­ty, as I said the game doesn't run too smooth­ly, and try­ing to record on a mod­er­ate­ly pow­er­ful lap­top didn't help it. Nei­ther did Win8.1 help. Al­so it has a pleb 1920x1080 res­o­lu­tion, in­stead of 1920x1200. First I tried OBS, but the screen record­ing fea­ture didn't work. Game cap­ture could be made to work, but you can't re­al­ly cap­ture RGB video on OBS with­out patch­ing it, and I didn't feel like mess­ing around for a week to get OBS to com­pile on wang­blows. I al­so tried Fraps, but it has the same bug as with old­er NFSs, if you start cap­ture, en­gine sound dis­ap­pears (even if you don't record au­dio). Um, then maybe Dx­to­ry? When I tried it in the past it didn't work well, maybe it will? I've down­loaded the tri­al, set up... seemed like to work. Now find a crack... uh, seems like on­ly an­cient ver­sions are cracked. Sigh. OK, down­grade, let's see what it gives... looks like no thread­ed com­pres­sor. Sigh. So just record un­com­pressed video? They're huge, so I had to make more space on the disk. I most­ly did it by re­mov­ing Steam, which no longer works on Win8.1 any­more. More rea­son to don't buy any game, warez is su­pe­ri­or in every way. For the record, the orig­i­nal of the above video is 55.6 GiB, 8.2 GiB af­ter con­vert­ing to loss­less H.264, and about 183 MiB for the high­est qual­i­ty AV1 here. Us­ing on­ly Wine is waaaaaaay bet­ter, when it works.