It doesn’t bring me any pleasure to add a more recent title to the archive, cancelled due to technical or time constraints. Sadly, this is the case with My Day On The Highway – a very promising looking car racer which caused some excitement in the C64 scene, but was not to be.
Developer Patai Gergely released a final version of his game in December 2025, after feeling they couldn’t evolve the game into the fun game they envisioned. So they decided to release it as is with two technical demos that you can check out here.
Patai goes into more details within Creator Speaks about everything. It’s a shame that it wasn’t to be, but we’re thankful for Patai having a go and also sharing his work with others to see the promise. Check it out for yourself and day dream of what could have been.
Contributions: Richard Bayliss
Supporting content
Available downloads
Gallery
Creator speaks
Patai Gergely talks about work on his game:
“After many years, I couldn’t really evolve this project into the fun little game I envisioned (my original inspiration was a mobile game called Daytona Rush), so I decided to release it in its final form. This cartridge contains two tech demos: the slightly updated version of the original shown in my popular YouTube video (including a day-night cycle and a life bar attached to the player), and a complete rewrite from 2024 that adds variation to both the cars and the scenery. Both of these support PAL and NTSC machines.
The first version doesn’t do anything particularly exciting on the technical side. It’s powered by a bespoke sprite multiplexer that was designed as a state machine to transform the linear road state into VIC register changes. Nearby cars that span two sprites vertically avoid glitches by sharing the top rows between the top and bottom halves. The scenery is updated via speedcode that emits the diff between subsequent frames.
The second version enhances the cars in two ways. It extends the view distance with dynamic sprites that faraway cars are rendered into on every frame (note that the colours of these sprites are updated via a rather peculiar interrupt routine). At the same time, it supports four different car models instead of just one, achieved by an on-demand sprite streaming system that brings in the required imagery at the start of the frame they are first needed. To achieve maximum performance, both the dynamic rendering and the streaming steps are performed with speedcode. Updating the road stripes, multiplexing the sprites and running the rest of the update logic at the same time was quite a puzzle to put together.
As for scenery, the newer prototype is based on the idea of segmenting diffs instead of treating the frames as a whole. For each prop (i.e. a tree or a rock in the current version) we have the transitions between the empty scene and repeating the prop indefinitely. Segmentation makes it possible to reuse parts of the repetition for the two transitions of starting and finishing repetition, and as a result the full animation of a prop on one side of the road can fit into a 16K cartridge page as speedcode similar to the original version. In the end, the only limitation to variation is storage capacity.
I think the overall approach has its merits, but ultimately I’m more interested in creating games with more substance. Fancy visuals should not limit the interactions but support them. Hopefully I can balance these aspects better in the future!”
