About
Stunt Car Racer is a racing video game developed by Geoff Crammond, published in 1989 by MicroProse for the Amiga, Atari ST, Commodore 64, MS-DOS, and ZX Spectrum (with an Amstrad CPC port following in 1990), in which two players race head-to-head on elevated tracks with ramps as the main obstacle. Stunt Car Racer STE is an early-stage experimental project exploring whether the Atari ST/STE's Blitter chip can speed up the original Stunt Car Racer's solid 3D polygon rendering, by patching select CPU-driven drawing routines (sky, ground, some polygon spans, and part of the car's engine graphics) to use the Blitter instead.
How it differs from the original
Unlike the original unmodified game, this project patches select rendering routines to use the ST/STE Blitter chip instead of the CPU — though as of now this hasn't produced a measurable performance improvement.
Getting started
The patches aren't a standalone runnable version — you need to run the original, unmodified Stunt Car Racer disk image in the Hatari emulator (configured as an STE with at least 1MB of memory), then use Hatari's built-in debugger to manually load each compiled patch binary before resuming execution.
History
The project responds to long-standing debate in the Atari ST and Amiga communities over whether Blitter-chip acceleration can meaningfully speed up solid-polygon 3D games like this one, using Stunt Car Racer as a real-world testbed for the idea.
Known limitations
- compatibility: Patches must be manually loaded into the Hatari debugger and overlaid on the original game; no standalone runnable disk image exists yet.
- performance: Blitter optimizations have not yet shown tangible performance improvements despite implementation.