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

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

#41

Post by ggambetta »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #40
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…

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.

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

#42

Post by stared »

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…

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/.

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

#43

Post by alberto-m »

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.

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.

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

#44

Post by hirra »

TacticalCoder wrote: post #40
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…

[flagged]

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

#45

Post by alberto-m »

mikestorrent wrote: post #3

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

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.

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

#47

Post by s-macke »

st_goliath wrote: post #37

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 i…

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.

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

#48

Post by s-macke »

iberator wrote: post #27
makepanic wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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...

Sorry, 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.
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