Reverse-engineering the world maps of Test Drive III after 5 years

A developer spent five years on-and-off reverse-engineering Accolade’s 1990 DOS racing game Test Drive III: The Passion, with AI assistance recently pushing the project close to completion. The motivation was nostalgic exploration rather than racing — as a kid the author roamed the game’s worlds, and this project rebuilds those maps as faithfully as the original data allows, with only stray artifacts like flying cars and missing sprites left to fix.

The technical writeup documents the game’s 3D format: meshes stored as three parallel arrays of 16-bit signed X/Y/Z vertex coordinates followed by 8-byte polygon records carrying type, vertex indices, and palette color, all prefixed by a short header. Each map is a 32×16 grid where every 2-byte cell encodes a tile ID plus packed rotation and height bits. The repo ships a Three.js browser viewer, Node CLI tools for extracting Wavefront OBJ meshes, VGA images, and scene sprites from the original DAT and LST files, and written specifications for the formats.

Beyond the nostalgia, the project is a useful artifact of game-preservation work: a clean, documented pipeline for pulling assets and geometry out of an early-90s proprietary engine, with galleries of extracted car models, scenery sprites, and palettes published alongside the format specs.