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Show HN: I reverse-engineered the world maps of Test Drive III (1990 DOS game)
- butz 4mo agoNeat viewer. I wonder, why boats and cars in groud view ended up in such high altitude?
- s-macke 4mo agoBecause I haven't found the special case in the disassembly for these "flying" objects. Probably I misinterpret the object coordinate somehow.
- mikestorrent 4mo agoI can hear the PC Speaker music in my head.... oh man! it was actually available in adlib! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayInv3ZZRak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayInv3ZZRak
- noufalibrahim 4mo agoMy old PC wasn't good enough to play the game. You could almost see each frame render. However, the PC speaker music was really nice and I used to run the game just to listen to that.
- alberto-m 4mo agoI used the MT32 audio. Not only because it sounded better, but because it would overload the CPU and slow down the game making it playable on my Pentium 75.
- quietsegfault 4mo agoI actually came here to post this. It's iconic music, bleeps and bloops!
- sedatk 4mo agoI used to play the demo of Test Drive III. It only had one map I believe. But I loved that it was a sandbox, so you could drive anywhere. I specifically remember following along the railroad. It was way ahead of its time back then.
- mikestorrent 4mo agoBetween this and Stunts 4d https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stunts_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stunts_(video_game) what more could a kid ask for
- tdrgabi 4mo agoCarmageddon would be what a kid could ask
- Cthulhu_ 4mo agoI wonder / doubt it or something like it would shock anyone as much as it seemed to back then.
- Schlagbohrer 4mo agoI remember the controversy over the original Postal, and then there were eventually 3 more sequels in that franchise. The culture resists at first and eventually loses the battle.
- mikestorrent 4mo ago360' splatter bonus
- verve_rat 4mo agoOh wow, that's a game I haven't thought about in forever. Thanks for reminding me.
- warpspin 4mo agoI'd ask for Rock n' Roll Racing!
- snthpy 4mo agoI used to play an Amiga 500 version of this. I think it was Test Drive 2 though.
- bzzzt 4mo agoTest Drive 2 (and 1) used a pseudo-3D renderer with scaled sprites (see https://www.mobygames.com/game/2107/the-duel-test-drive-ii/screenshots/ https://www.mobygames.com/game/2107/the-duel-test-drive-ii/s...) TD3 used a 'real' 3D engine, but as a result it needed a beefy machine for the day. Driving felt a lot slower too, I never found it as much fun as TD2.
- tdalaa 4mo agoAh, that's so lovely! Will definitely try this!
- nntlol 4mo agoI always love any reverse engineered projects
- moviepiq 4mo ago[dead]
- ggambetta 4mo agoI'm very happy to see this! Not so much because of TDIII (which I played, although not nearly as much as Stunts), but because there seems to be some momentum building around recreating old games using AI agents, and I love that! I had explored some related ideas [0] but throwing Claude at the problem seems super promising. The recent Crimsonland thing [1] was great! [0] https://www.gabrielgambetta.com/remakes.html https://www.gabrielgambetta.com/remakes.html [1] https://banteg.xyz/posts/crimsonland/ https://banteg.xyz/posts/crimsonland/
- noufalibrahim 4mo agoThis is an interesting area. I've felt that with AI, it would be nice to have a project that I work on "by hand" so that my general skills don't atrophy and I've been writing an implementation of the Kyra engine used by old DOS games like Eye of the Beholder. It's mostly well documented and there are full fledged implementations (like with ScummVM) so this is just exercise for me. I wrote a decoder for the CPS file format they use for sprites and it worked file for all images except one. It rendered half the image properly and then scrambled the rest. I could see that the sprite information was there but there was some offset problem. I had claude dig into it in detail along and gave it the ScummVM source for reference. I also gave it Ghidra so that it could debug the actual EOB.EXE file but nothing we tried got it to render properly. Even SSI's own code which got from a modding wiki failed to render this image. My final conclusion was that it was a half done asset that somehow found its way into the asset archive and is never used in the game but that's a flaky conclusion given that its name is referenced in the EXE. I've been having a lot of fun upscaling the sprites used for the cutscenes and remixing the music using AI. It's a game I played a lot as a kid so being able to tinker with it at a low level is a nice distraction. It's purely a "fun" side project without deadlines or anything so I get to do what I want with it without any hassles about "being productive".
- eru 4mo agoI played a lot of Stunts in the 1990s. I only learned in the 2010s that you could actually edit the terrain, too.
- christkv 4mo agoMe and some friends spent so much time playing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stunt_Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stunt_Island
- Asfand3099 4mo ago[flagged]
- sgm1018 4mo agoI used to play this, thats awesome.
- xattt 4mo agoOh man, the controls on mobile remind me of a bad dream where you don’t quite have full control of your flying.
- iberator 4mo agoNot even one map as jpg or png to see on the webpage!!! Whats the point of this project? You expect us to load npm just to see some maps?!
- makepanic 4mo agoRead the Readme. They've linked to https://s-macke.github.io/Test-Drive-3-Maps/ https://s-macke.github.io/Test-Drive-3-Maps/
- iberator 4mo agothis is not jpg or png but some dynamic stuff. It freezes up my phone. Why do you need to complicate the stuff so much? Direct jpg or png could be rendered even by pentium 100 with 32mb of ram...
- tclancy 4mo agoYour last maid die of exhaustion? https://github.com/s-macke/Test-Drive-3-Maps/blob/master/images/README.md https://github.com/s-macke/Test-Drive-3-Maps/blob/master/ima...
- s-macke 4mo agoSorry, the maps are rendered in 3D so that you can fly around. I can of course make top-down screenshots of the maps. Thanks for your feedback.
- tclancy 4mo agoNow do TD (the original)! I remember thinking it was something from the future when it came out on C64. Similar feeling of seeing something from two years from now with Mach 3 in the arcade.
- VJ-2-108 4mo agoImpressive dedication, reverse engineering 35 years old game files is no small task.
- selimthegrim 4mo agoI was always fixated on trying to run over the chicken
- p0w3n3d 4mo agoOn Pacific Coast 3 you can see the infinite highway. I remember turning right to a highway and there was a highway exit that if I missed I would run again this highway as on Moebious' strip to the beginning. This gave the world an infinite vibe
- st_goliath 4mo agoIn October of 2013, Ross Scott did a review of Test Driver III in one of the early "Ross' Game Dungeon" episodes[1]. IIRC in the video, he mentioned that he's fascinated by game maps to the degree of a slight obsession, and would absolutely love if someone could reverse engineer the game assets and extract the maps. Someone later went on to do just that and responded in the Accursed farms forum, Ross mentioned that in his July 2015 follow up video[2]. In the video he showed some map screen shots from the forum, including a surprisingly intricate map that was apparently only used for the the spinning car menu screen. IIRC the reverse engineering project was not quite complete at the time, since the README doesn't mention any of this, I assume this project is unrelated? That said, it would be amazing to eventually get the extracted maps integrated into noclip.website[3]. [1] https://accursedfarms.com/index.php?af-posts/537/test-drive-3/ https://accursedfarms.com/index.php?af-posts/537/test-drive-... [2] https://accursedfarms.com/index.php?af-posts/522/follow-up-episode-1/ https://accursedfarms.com/index.php?af-posts/522/follow-up-e... [3] https://noclip.website/ https://noclip.website/
- s-macke 4mo agoAuthor here. The Ross’s Game Dungeon video was, to some degree, a motivation for me to start the reverse-engineering process, just for fun. The analysis took place over many years, and I figured out 95% of the format myself. AI helped me then with the coloring, which is pretty complex. I have read the Accursed Farms forum, of course. But it didn't help much. The map mentioned there can be found as “Unknown Map” in the dropdown. However, I haven’t yet connected that map to the menu screen. It might be called “Tom’s Test Track,” because that string appears in the disassembly. Integration into noclip might be easy, because I also have the geometry as a standalone .obj file.
- aenis 4mo agoWonderful stuff - thanks! I was thinking about doing this as well. I just completed recreating one of my childhood favourites, Thrust. Opus 4.7 almost one-shot the game (was perfect in 30 mins based on just the wikipedia entry describing the game), and then I spent 3 full nights trying to build perfect algorithmic AI to auto play it. (It thoroughly failed, sticking to a sub-par algo that was ok, but not nearly as good as possible). My next stop is reimplementing Mercenary. First open world game I played. On a 8b commodore Plus/4.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- smy-hn 4mo ago[dead]
- postexitus 4mo agoNever played TD - How does it compare to Lotus? More of a simulation?
- sedatk 4mo agoYes, much more realistic for sure.
- ThreatPortSec 4mo ago[flagged]
- sjdv1982 4mo agoI played that game!! Although I was 10 years old and barely knew any English. After some playing, I always got a "go home" note on my windshield, I never found out why.
- conception 4mo agoOT but Test Drive 2’s theme song was a banger - https://youtu.be/OLwqMX0mS5Y?si=YWGYkwwg_JWloXHb https://youtu.be/OLwqMX0mS5Y?si=YWGYkwwg_JWloXHb Also the IIGS syth is-was so good.
- garrett2558 4mo agoThis was my childhood!