Were you a fan of Virtua Racing on the Genesis/Mega Drive? Were you aware that it was originally from the Sega Model 1; their Arcade Machines from the 90’s. Well if you were, and you wanted even more gameplay on a classic F1 styled racing game it looks like you’re in luck. Because thanks to some more incredible work from within the community, you can now play the classic Model 1 Virtua Racing game again; with a lot more packed in than there ever was before.
A user who goes by Wanszai over on Github has just recently put out a release of Virtua Racing that can be played on both PC and Xbox Series consoles. This comes not long after their release last week of a similar Emulator for Virtua Fighter. Both of these apply to Model 1 Arcade systems from Sega which is why they were likely able to get both running as of recently. If you want to play either of these, all you need is your own legally obtained copy of Virtua Racing titled vr.zip, and it just gets placed in the folder you download from Wanszai’s github page. Once you do that, you’re up and running with quite a lot more than before.
The big thing about this port is its support for online play with up to 8 players. That means you can connect with a bunch of people and have your own Virtua Racing matches whenever you’d like, with instructions for setting up and hosting also on the Github page. Outside of that you get support for English or Japanese, Controller Options, and Video options for both widescreen and up to 60 FPS; though it’s noted this could cause artifacting.
It’s awesome to see more projects like this make an appearance and it’ll be cool to see what comes of it. As always be sure to check out their Github page for more information, and if you want to support Wanszai, they’ve also left their Ko-Fi page for tips. Hopefully we see more of this in the future.
