When the PlayStation 1 was the gaming king, there was one series that really was incredibly far ahead of its time. I am, of course, talking about Driver. Massive open-world racing, some incredible driving physics, fantastic graphics for their time, and just some straight-up awesome car chases. It was everything you wanted from a movie-style car chase. People diving out of the way at the last second, big jumps, boxes to smash through and reckless police cars to smash up. Awesome.
So, imagine my excitement when today, I saw that a team has ported the game to PC after all these years. A team of indie developers led by someone called Soapy, if that is their real name, has fully reverse-engineered the game. This isn’t an emulation thing, this is now running natively on PC.
The benefit of this is that the game can run at modern resolutions and frame rates. That’s right, Driver 2 in 60 FPS goodness. But how was it done? The team built the project from the ground up. They reverse-engineered the game, so the source code is built from assembly and compiled natively. It still uses the original assets, so you’ll need an ISO. Honestly, it’s pretty damn clever and because they’ve not really emulated anything, I should be above board and clean in regards to a DMCA.
You can download the latest version of the port here. However, they’re already working on improvements and bug fixes, so expect further updates in the near future.
