Rally-X – An Arcade conversion of Rally X for the Amiga is in the works via JOTD [UPDATE]

It wasn’t too long ago that many of us had the pleasure of playing Allan Turvey’s Terrapins RX; a Rally X Remix demo which was based on the 1980 game by Namco and official conversion Maze Death Race which was released later in 1983 by PSS for the ZX Spectrum 16K! Well it’s time for the Amiga to get in on the Rally fun, as thanks to Tom contacting us today, he has told us that JOTD is working on a brand new Arcade conversion of Rally-X for the Amiga AGA and ECS!

A project originally shelved in summer 2025 due to a notoriously buggy Z80 converter has been revived after a complete software rewrite, triggering a wave of classic arcade ports that have been mentioned on Indie Retro News. The fresh code worked almost flawlessly right out of the gate, delivering on the promise to make it “rain Z80 games” with titles like Commando and Vulgus already leading the way. This breakthrough also marks a milestone for Bosconian, which shares the same underlying hardware and graphics layout. While the current build relies on AGA hardware to handle the necessary dual-playfield side screens, the developer says that ECS machines could eventually run it using a few clever colour-reduction tricks. Best of all, because the game completely bypasses the blitter and relies solely on hardware sprites, it is expected to hit 50 frames per second even on stock, vanilla setups.

• – jotd: Z80 reverse-engineering, 68000 transcode, graphics conversion, sound conversion for the Amiga.
• – no9: music
• – PascalDe73: icons
• – Namco: original game

[UPDATE] JOTD has made available the first beta version with the following being said. “No adf right now. It works but I think there are issues on slow machines. It’s not a real cpu issue, it’s more a Namco crap coding issue that makes the game time-sensitive. Example: Last bug I hunted was enemy cars locking up with each other without reason. They had put a countdown to prevent that, but on a fast cpu, the mainloop is running so fast that the countdown doesn’t work. And on slow machines, this problem doesn’t exist, but other problems arise because irq fires too often compared to non-irq mainloop. I could test it with cycle exact on a relatively fast cpu and it worked fine, so you can report success or failure depending on your configuration”

Links 1) Source (BETA)