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

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

#31

Post by bombcar » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 10:35 AM UTC

lantastic wrote: post #24

ggambetta wrote: post #14

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…

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.

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

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

#32

Post by Schlagbohrer » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 10:40 AM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #15

tdrgabi wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Carmageddon would be what a kid could ask

I wonder / doubt it or something like it would shock anyone as much as it seemed to back then.

I 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.

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

#33

Post by selimthegrim » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 10:42 AM UTC

I was always fixated on trying to run over the chicken

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

#34

Post by p0w3n3d » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 10:56 AM UTC

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

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

#35

Post by prawn » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 11:35 AM UTC

mikestorrent wrote: post #4

sedatk wrote: post #2

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.

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

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

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

#36

Post by spankibalt » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 12:22 PM UTC

christkv wrote: post #23

ggambetta wrote: post #14

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…

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

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

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

#37

Post by st_goliath » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 12:46 PM UTC

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/

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

#38

Post by aenis » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 12:47 PM UTC

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.

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

#39

Post by anton_gogolev » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 12:47 PM UTC

warpspin wrote: post #13

mikestorrent wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'd ask for Rock n' Roll Racing!

I remember being mocked slightly when I was headbangin' and footstompin' to the soundtrack.

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

#40

Post by TacticalCoder » Wed, Jun 03, 2026, 1:02 PM UTC

ggambetta wrote: post #14

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…

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?