Game Objects and Level Format

I've made a lot of progress. After a lot of hard work I've figured out the internal object format used by OutRun for most sprites and game objects which is a big breakthrough. I understand the complete format, with the exception of a single bit that eludes me right now. The internal format is a lot more complex than the values finally written directly to the sprite hardware, as it includes aspects like:

• Both Screen Co-ordinates & World co-ordinates
• Sprite Z Values
• Independent priority settings in relation to the road layer and other sprites
• Specific Sprite routines to use
• X/Y Draw anchors
• Sprite Type
• Frame Number
• The way in which the sprites utilise a series of lookup tables to extract more properties
  
• All the usual things you'd expect: h-flip values, palette settings and so forth.

The traffic sprite format uses a version of this, but adds additional properties:

• Bits to denote the traffic's position in relation to other traffic. This is used to control its speed and lane changing behaviour. 
• Speed
• Information regarding the side of the road the traffic has spawned on

Even after establishing the above, and also a lot of related code - one thing is pretty clear: the codebase to this game is advanced and complex.

I also understand the internal format used to store the scenery data for the entire set of levels. Writing a quick utility to spit this out in some kind of visual form would be an interesting exercise and a way of verifying this. Whilst all the code is documented and commented, looking at it actually hurts by brain. I'll follow up on this later.