For more than half a century, Yasuaki Kurata has been one of the most prominent and singular Japanese actors in international action cinema. After becoming a major star in Hong Kong during the Golden ...

The director of a planned production of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" admitted to sending himself threatening texts that eventually got the play canceled out of safety concerns.

Here is footage of the opening cutscene/cinematic in A5 (Version 1.0.0 compiled on December 20th 1996). This is NOT an FMV cinematic, this is running in real-time (at a resolution of 640x480 pixels) on the NEC PowerVR PCX1 3D accelerator (GPU) and Pentium Pro processor. The shadows that buildings and trains cast in the footage are shadow volumes rendered by the PowerVR 3D card and are part of the hardware features of the Series 1 cards (PCX1 and its successor PCX2). The opening can NOT be watched unless a PowerVR Series 1 card is installed in the system, but the game can still be played without a PowerVR card (albeit without 3D view/3D graphics available, only 2D view will work). The shadow volumes do not appear in the game itself, only in the opening. The Playstation version's opening is an FMV sequence based on a video recording of the original PowerVR version of A5. The game is called "Urban Development Simulation Game A-Train 5" according to the application's title bar. The "バージョン情報" (version information) screen, which is basically the "About..." section of A5, indicates that the game can be run in both "Normal CPU Mode" and also an MMX enhanced mode according to the manual, as A5 is one of the first x86 applications to support MMX instructions usage/optimizations. Here are the specifications for the computer/PC being used: - Dell OptiPlex GXPro case and motherboard (manufactured in July 1996) - Intel 440FX chipset - Intel Pentium Pro 200 Mhz (256KB L2 cache) processor - S3 Trio64V+ (2MB) video card - NEC PC 3DEngine (NEC PowerVR PCX1) accelerator card - Creative Labs Sound Blaster AWE32 (CT3900) sound card - 256 MBs of EDO DRAM/memory - Microsoft Windows 95 (Japanese OSR 2.1 OEM) operating system Drivers used for the NEC PC 3DEngine card: 1.0.0c1. Drivers used for the S3 Trio64V+ card: Default Win95 OSR 2.1 drivers. The game uses the SGL (Super Graphics Library) API for native PowerVR 3D acceleration. In late 1996, Videologic and NEC together produced and released the first commercially available PowerVR 3D accelerator card (not counting the Midas3 installed/bundled in Compaq Presario 8000 series computers); the NEC PC3DEngine, powered by the Videologic-licensed and NEC-manufactured PCX1 (codenamed Midas4) chip/IC. The PCX1 was a chip ahead of its time in some ways and gravely misunderstood at the time due to its lack of bi-linear filtering and need for a somewhat faster processor to perform at an adequate level in contrast to other 3D accelerators of the time (although that would depend on how any given game was coded). 24-bit color depth and very impressive shadow volume effects were possible thanks to the nature of the PCX1's depth cueing (hidden-surface removal) hardware and tile-based deferred rendering (TBDR), making it possible to get said visual benefits at a negligible performance cost. Despite lacking bi-linear texture filtering, mip-mapping is still accounted for to reduce visual artifacts at a distance. The PCX1 ran at its best using the SGL API developed for the PowerVR Series 1 cards (Series 2 being the CLX2 as used in the Sega Dreamcast). A Ressha De Ikou 5 by Artdink (1996) #windows95 #atrain #powervr #artdink