danielgomesvieira2000/beetle-adventure-racing-recomp v0.2.0-alpha on GitHub

Second public build. Windows x64.

No game data is included. You must supply your own legally-dumped
Beetle Adventure Racing! (USA) ROM — SHA-1 e5ab4d226c08d22f68a2edcc48870203e67454b8.

Install

Download beetle-adventure-racing-recomp-v0.2.0-alpha-windows-x64.zip and extract it anywhere
(keep the assets folder next to the executable).
Run beetle-adventure-racing-recomp.exe. On first launch the launcher shows Load ROM —
point it at your ROM and it is cached in your config directory; afterwards it starts straight
from Start Game.

Settings, key bindings, Controller Pak saves and the cached ROM live in
%LOCALAPPDATA%\beetle-adventure-racing-recomp.

Controllers actually work now

This is the headline, and it is a fix rather than a feature. In v0.1.0-alpha no gamepad worked at
all, and the launcher's Controls tab remapped nothing. Both had the same cause: the frontend's
input layer owns the SDL event queue, so the hotplug events the port was watching for never reached
it, and the game read its buttons from a separate set of tables that the Controls tab does not write.

Gamepads work, and are assigned to players in the order they are connected — first pad is
player one, second is player two, up to four. No modal to go through first.
The keyboard is always player one, alongside whatever pad it has, so either can be used at any
moment without choosing.
Remapping in the Controls tab is applied to the game. If you have an existing
controls.json, reset the bindings in that tab to pick up the new defaults.
Rumble strength is applied instead of ignored.
Default keyboard layout: arrows for the stick, X = A, C = B, Z = Z trigger,
Enter = Start, A/S = L/R, IJKL = C buttons, TFGH = D-pad.

Sound

Main Volume works. It was inert in every previous build — the slider moved and nothing else
did.
Mute When Not In Focus, new, on by default.

Widescreen: the pause screen

The pause menu's darkened backdrop now covers the whole widened frame instead of sitting in a 4:3
box with bright picture either side of it. That took three separate fixes, none of them the one it
looked like: the backdrop is orthographic geometry rather than a 2D rectangle, the port was pinning
every orthographic layer to the left edge during a race (which is right for the speedometer needle
and wrong for this), and even once widened it stopped short because the game draws it inset for a
television.

Launcher

The game's icon as the launcher's background, and Mods and Quit entries.
The full Lato family plus NotoEmoji now ship, so text renders in the weights the menus ask for.
NotoEmoji-Regular.ttf was missing and the frontend loads it unconditionally, so every previous
build failed a font load at startup.
A first run with no saved graphics settings starts fullscreen at the display's own resolution.

For people building it

The repository is now standalone. No submodules, nothing to git submodule update, and no
dependency on any fork: git clone gives you everything needed to build. Every library it builds
against is committed under lib/ as ordinary source, each keeping its own licence and its own
authors — see the README's Credits and THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.

There is a debug menu on F1, in this build, with nothing to switch on. It lists every 2D element
and every projection the frame contains, with its identity and the widescreen class the port gave
it; hovering a row outlines that element on screen and a dropdown changes its class from the next
frame. It is how the pause-screen fix above was found. docs/HUD-INSPECTOR.md is the guide. F2 is
deliberately unbound — the renderer uses it to toggle ray tracing for the session with nothing on
screen to say so.

Known issues

An intermittent crash at startup in the game's audio scheduler (_uvScDoneAud) has been seen
once and not reproduced. If the game fails to start, try again. See docs/KNOWN_ISSUES.md.
stretch and spill, two of the debug menu's widescreen classes, have no built-in users yet and
are untested against most of the game's elements.