Show HN: I reverse-engineered the world maps of Test Drive III (1990 DOS game)

https://github.com/s-macke/Test-Drive-3-Maps

by s-macke • 2 months ago

215 56 2 months ago

sedatk2• 2 months ago

I 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.

mikestorrent3• 2 months ago

Between this and Stunts 4d https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stunts_(video_game) what more could a kid ask for

tdrgabi• 2 months ago

Carmageddon would be what a kid could ask

verve_rat• 2 months ago

Oh wow, that's a game I haven't thought about in forever. Thanks for reminding me.

warpspin• 2 months ago

I'd ask for Rock n' Roll Racing!

47282847• 2 months ago

Time for a modernized port true to the original! I also liked the TrackMania series but I wish there was something reduced to the amazing essence of Stunts.

prawn• 2 months ago

Super Off Road... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Off_Road

mrighele• 2 months ago

I remember a map where just at the start, you could turn around, jump over an open bridge and finish it in less than a minute.

On the other hand most maps have loops and I would regularly get lost, unable to finish it...

quietsegfault2• 2 months ago

I can still hear the PC speaker music in my head.

mikestorrent3• 2 months ago

I can hear the PC Speaker music in my head.... oh man! it was actually available in adlib! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayInv3ZZRak

noufalibrahim2• 2 months ago

My 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-m2• 2 months ago

I 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.

quietsegfault2• 2 months ago

I actually came here to post this. It's iconic music, bleeps and bloops!

snthpy• 2 months ago

I used to play an Amiga 500 version of this. I think it was Test Drive 2 though.

bzzzt• 2 months ago

Test Drive 2 (and 1) used a pseudo-3D renderer with scaled sprites (see 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• 2 months ago

Ah, that's so lovely! Will definitely try this!

nntlol• 2 months ago

I always love any reverse engineered projects

ggambetta2• 2 months ago

I'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

[1] https://banteg.xyz/posts/crimsonland/

noufalibrahim2• 2 months ago

This 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• 2 months ago

I played a lot of Stunts in the 1990s. I only learned in the 2010s that you could actually edit the terrain, too.

christkv• 2 months ago

Me and some friends spent so much time playing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stunt_Island

spankibalt• 2 months ago

The birth of machinima! One of the giants of 90s PC gaming, nothing even remotely like it on other platforms of the day.

lantastic• 2 months ago

Stunts was the greatest! You could make your own tracks, save replays and (IIRC) even resume gameplay from any point in the replay. My very favorite game of all time.

bombcar• 2 months ago

Reaume-from-replay is a feature mode games should have, really.

alberto-m2• 2 months ago

The community is still active! In the meanwhile the car format has been figured out, so that modern-day tournaments like ZakStunts feature vehicles not included in the original game.

TacticalCoder• 2 months ago

Your blog entry:

https://www.gabrielgambetta.com/remakes.html

is wild!

I love the idea. I used Claude Code / Sonnet 4.6 to get back to compile an old DOS game I wrote back around 1991 and for which I had lost the tooling (compiler / linker / notes / build files). It was on my todo list since years, decades even, but I never got to it. With a LLM it was easy: I didn't let the LLM do everything, I used it to find what needed fixing (like two macros I had used with names that were now clashing with "modern" compilers methods names etc.).

I hacked together the art using my terrible Gimp skills and some Public Domain and Creative Commons assets from OpenGameArt

IMO AI models are better at generating pictures than at writing code, in that pictures do tolerate sloppy approximations. While code doesn't tolerate slop that much.

Why not use AI for the assets?

ggambetta2• 2 months ago

That's a great idea! Just haven't gotten that far yet (that article is pre-LLM, and I'm very early in a new AI-driven reconstruction). But yeah, taking the original extracted sprites and having Nano Banana upscale or redraw them is a great idea.

vunderba2• 2 months ago

IMO AI models are better at generating pictures than at writing code, in that pictures do tolerate sloppy approximations.

So does code. You can have poorly written code that runs slow but gets the job done because modern machines are powerful enough to make up the difference. (cough the majority of electron apps cough).

You’re definitely going to get dinged more for AI art. People can’t see the code, but they can see the art - that’s their first experience with the game unless the code is so bad that it literally causes visible bugs.

I work heavily in the generative space and while standalone AI art has come a long way, maintaining visual consistency in sprite assets across an entire game still needs a ton of hand holding particularly if you require animated sprite assets without them looking "uncanny valley".

stared• 2 months ago

And a laser puzzle game Chromatron, https://quesma.com/blog/chromatron-recompiled/.

But it gets even wilder, as now creating a Game Boy Advance emulator became a benchmark, https://gbaeval.com/.

vunderba2• 2 months ago

But what if we could run the original binary game code unmodified, just with better art?

There's an entire category of rom hacks devoted to this - replacing just the sprite data.

You should also take a look at 3dSen. It’s an emulator that works with original NES ROMs but transforms the graphics into 3D voxels.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1147940/3dSen_PC/

mike_hock• 2 months ago

I used to absolutely love this kind of content. Reading the details of how someone reverse-engineered an old game, maybe figured out how some particular part of it worked. A high-fidelity rewrite is the absolute maximum you could achieve.

Unfortunately, as soon as there's something about LLMs and AI agents in there, it all just becomes ... meh.

sgm1018• 2 months ago

I used to play this, thats awesome.

xattt• 2 months ago

Oh man, the controls on mobile remind me of a bad dream where you don’t quite have full control of your flying.

iberator2• 2 months ago

Not 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• 2 months ago

Read the Readme.

They've linked to https://s-macke.github.io/Test-Drive-3-Maps/

iberator2• 2 months ago

this 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...

tclancy2• 2 months ago

Now 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• 2 months ago

Impressive dedication, reverse engineering 35 years old game files is no small task.

selimthegrim• 2 months ago

I was always fixated on trying to run over the chicken

p0w3n3d• 2 months ago

On 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• 2 months ago

In 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-...

[2] https://accursedfarms.com/index.php?af-posts/522/follow-up-e...

[3] https://noclip.website/

s-macke3• 2 months ago

Author 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• 2 months ago

Wonderful 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.

butz• 2 months ago

Neat viewer. I wonder, why boats and cars in groud view ended up in such high altitude?

s-macke3• 2 months ago

Because I haven't found the special case in the disassembly for these "flying" objects. Probably I misinterpret the object coordinate somehow.

postexitus• 2 months ago

Never played TD - How does it compare to Lotus? More of a simulation?

sedatk2• 2 months ago

Yes, much more realistic for sure.

sjdv1982• 2 months ago

I 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• 2 months ago

OT but Test Drive 2’s theme song was a banger - https://youtu.be/OLwqMX0mS5Y?si=YWGYkwwg_JWloXHb

Also the IIGS syth is-was so good.

garrett2558• 2 months ago

This was my childhood!

Show HN: I reverse-engineered the world maps of Test Drive III (1990 DOS game)

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