Turbo Cup on DOS hits you like a brick wall of cyan and magenta.

For 1988, this was considered a top-tier racer. Loriciels even slapped René Metge’s Porsche 944 Turbo Cup license on it—and if you were lucky, your copy came with a toy car in the box. Big presentation for a game that, in hindsight, is more style than substance.

Play it now and you’ll see how far the genre has come. Racing games have aged better than almost any other, and this one shows it. The controls are stiff. The handling feels like it’s actively working against you. You’re mostly just jabbing at the arrow keys, but it still manages to feel rough.

So why bother? Because of the graphics. On DOS you can pick CGA, EGA, or Hercules—but CGA is where the magic lives. Cyan roads. Pink skies. Black outlines. Four colors turning French circuits into something closer to surrealist art than motorsport. EGA and Hercules might be cleaner, but they’ll never look this weirdly beautiful.

The Amiga and Atari ST versions pack in more color and sound, but they don’t touch DOS at its lowest end. There’s something hypnotic about watching a Porsche 944 tear across Paul Ricard under a bubblegum sky. Ugly-pretty in the best way.

And sound? Forget it. This was 1988. No AdLib. No Sound Blaster. Just silence. If audio’s your thing, you’re better off elsewhere.

Some people swear this is Loriciels’ finest. Me—I’ll let Jim Power have that crown. But Turbo Cup is worth firing up anyway. Not because it’s the smoothest racer of its time, but because it proves that sometimes the “worst” graphics mode ends up being the one you never forget.

DOS didn’t get realism—it got neon surrealism. And that’s the legacy.

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