Fatal Racing / Whiplash S3 ViRGE OEM Release Found & Preserved

In this video I finally fulfil a dream that started way back in December of 2020.

As a fresh-faced new YouTuber I was asked to be a part of that year’s DOScember, a yearly celebration of all things MS-DOS. I had a longer-term project in the works focussing on my IBM 5150 that would release toward the end of the month, but in the meantime, I spotted a cheap 233MHz Pentium MMX system on ebay and decided to snap it up in the hope of putting out a quick video.

The details are well covered in the videos, but in summary that fateful purchase led me down quite the path – researching, testing, and documenting every single game that specifically supported the S3 ViRGE, an early PC 3D graphics card dating to 1995 that just happened to be inside that very PC.

Unfortunately there was one game that hadn’t been preserved anywhere online – a DOS racer by British developer Gremlin Interactive known as Whiplash in North America, and Fatal Racing everywhere else – more specifically, a very limited HP OEM release bundled with PCs containing this early 3D accelerator.

This video is the story of how I was contacted by a viewer 6 months after the project went public, and how we preserved and documented this rare release for future generations, making the complete set of ViRGE-accelerated games available online for the first time.

But does the game actually live up to expectations? I suppose there’s only one way to find out. Fire up the MMX!

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