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

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 somewhat fascinated by game maps, to the degree of a slight obsession, and would absolutely love if someone could reverse engineer the game assets.

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 entirely 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/

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.

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/

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.

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

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

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

I always love any reverse engineered projects

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

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

I was always fixated on trying to run over the chicken

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

I used to play this, thats awesome.

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.

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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?!