Nuexzz: you'll have to compare notes with me on what method you used.
isamu: Basically the hud in the game looks like crap. It doesn't look much better on the 360 version but I've decided to re-work everything anyway. The car textures and the stage textures, ect, they'd held up really well. There's not really any point in touching those. I can live with the stretched menus and what not, but the in-game hud really needs re-worked. Fortunately, most of it is just text and the outrun style font is available, so it'd just be a matter of typing out all the text with a ttf and re-saving to a texture. Then what's left is the giant yellow timer at the top of the screen (fairly easy, just 9 digits) and the speedo. It would be really nice to replace the character sprites as well as they've aged poorly, but that might not be 100% possible.
The main reason I'm looking into it, is because I'm at least going to have to do a basic hook for the new outrun radio feature. It would probably be a good idea to display the song title when using the radio buttons.
Also there are other strange graphical differences I'd like to address, they are minor, but they bug the hell out of me.
Examples:
Clarissa has been censored... no clue why, but they put a undershirt on her. Which isn't a big deal, but they kind of shopped it in (or at least it looks that way) so all of her sprites look a little fake. I believe Holly has been altered as well. The main thing though is those stupid keyboard icons. For some reason they decided to put keyboard keys on the menus to tell you to switch songs, ect even though these functions are mapped to various in-game controls like the gas pedal, the horn or the view button. I would like to swap these out with the or2sp icons, which is what the arcade uses and is more helpful.