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

In plain words

This project presents reverse-engineered world maps from Test Drive III, the 1990 DOS racing game. The creator has reconstructed the game's map data and made it available on GitHub. The work documents the technical structure of the original game's environments, making it useful for retro gaming enthusiasts, game preservation efforts, and developers interested in how early 1990s racing games stored and rendered their track layouts.

written from the facts on this page · September 2026

From the sources

As a kid, I played Test Drive III a lot. Not because of the racing, but simply to explore the world. There was so much to see, so much to discover. This project is an attempt to reconstruct those maps as accurately as possible. Over the past five years, I have worked on it on and off. Now, with the help of AI, I am close to success. Apart from the occasional flying car and missing sprites. The 3D format itself is nothing too exotic, but it does contain a few special cases. Each tile or object is a small mesh stored as three parallel arrays of 16-bit signed X, Y, and Z vertex coordinates, followed by 8-byte polygon records containing the polygon type, vertex indices, and palette color. These…from github.com

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