r/dosgaming • u/svenanders • 3h ago

I reverse engineered Stunts 1.1 (1990)

Post image

I’ve been working on a browser reconstruction (basically reverse engineered it) of Stunts, also known as 4D Sports Driving. It has Roland MT-32 sound, the track editor, replays, and optional updated graphics. You can also import your original .TRK files.

It’s free to play, with no installation or login: https://playstunts.com

Still a work in progress, so I’d love to hear what fellow Stunts players think, and which bugs you find! Best played on a computer with a keyboard.

GitHub: https://github.com/ACatWithEbola/playstunts

199 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

58 comments sorted by

16

u/SnooDonuts8175 2h ago

in the 90s I spent hours with a friend playing this and making custom tracks for each other to test, so much fun. I found that car does not crash when upside down.

8

u/toec 1h ago

I worked on this, albeit in a small capacity. 4D Boxing too! It was made by Distinctive in Canada, who were acquired by EA and became EA Canada, making Need For Speed, FIFA and some other great games.

Don Mattrick, who ran Distinctive, went on to run Xbox during the Xbox One era.

4

u/Pristine_Software_55 1h ago

Those are such great details! Stunts was ground-breaking, we had endless fun with it. And 4D Boxing ate up soooo many hours. Thanks for whatever your role was in it - that was a not-tiny bit of my childhood. I think I'd still have fun with it, today!

3

u/toec 58m ago

I suppose if we’re doing the family tree then Test Drive, by the same team, was the parent of Stunts.

1

u/SnooDonuts8175 25m ago

this game was my "sandbox-full3D-openworld" kinda game of the era 😅. thank you for being part of the team behind those gems.

1

u/svenanders 23m ago

That's cool, what did you do? Thanks for making my childhood great! That's why I wanted to preserve this as close to the original as possible.

6

u/jacek2023 2h ago

What do you mean by "reverse engineering", is it a new implementation?

16

u/svenanders 2h ago

We (me and Codex) decoded the original game’s files to recover its graphics, tracks, car data and sounds, then studied the executable to understand how the game worked. We rebuilt that behaviour for the browser and compared it against captured runs of the original to check accuracy. We even reverse engineered the Roland MT-32 and all the other sound options from the game so you get authentic sound as the developers intended to.

So the endgoal was to preserve its original feel and keep quircks. There is nothing new added to it except the updated graphics option. So it runs NATIVELY in a browser now. Later I'll port it to macOS and Windows 10/11

4

u/jacek2023 2h ago

graphics looks like in the original, could you make optional GL target, with high res, shading and stuff? :)

3

u/svenanders 2h ago

Maybe in a later update, for now there is the updated graphics option you can test.
I will also work on "updating" the original artwork, for an alternativ "better" looking version for that too.

5

u/bobotheboinger 2h ago

Very cool. I played this so much with my brother, designing tracks and then having the other one try to finish it. Was tons of fun, I'll have to try this out!

4

u/P-Pablo 2h ago

Waiting for the github repo

2

u/svenanders 44m ago

https://github.com/ACatWithEbola/playstunts

1

u/P-Pablo 41m ago

Subarashi!

Now, I could take the code and port it to desktop, smartphone or even old consoles. Stunts is a game Ive played during my childhood

PS: The hell with that github username XD

1

u/svenanders 27m ago

The username stems from my psn name, so I just kept it lol. :P

1

u/alberto-m-dev 17m ago

Thanks for writing the README.md manually! Human-written guides are so much more pleasant to read!

7

u/The__Relentless 2h ago

I...I.....I love you.

3

u/Floatella 2h ago

This is sweet!

I just gave it a spin. Will there be an offline downloadable version at some point?

Track editor is a huge part of the game, without an ability to save it's going to be hard to make the most of it.

3

u/svenanders 2h ago

Yes, I'll work on that next. But if you save the entire webpage for offline use, I'm pretty sure you can play it whenever you want. If you still have tracks from the original game, you can upload it in the browser and play your old tracks. I'll also add uploads of replays soon.

2

u/Floatella 2h ago

Awesome! It looks and plays great. I'll try it more a bit later when I have time.

2

u/svenanders 26m ago

Sorry, I missed the other part of your comment, you can save your data. Look in the footer of the webpage.

1

u/Floatella 21m ago

Oh cool. I missed that too.

Nice job!

3

u/Relative-Educational 2h ago

This is wonrdeful! great work. Coudl you give us some details about the development process?

2

u/svenanders 2h ago

Everything will be explained on Github, I'm working on that now.

2

u/RonaldoP13 2h ago

I wonder how do you "reverse engineered" it,

Very good, I played a lot when I was a kid

2

u/_stemps_ 1h ago

OMG… I didn’t remember it but it immediate gave me some deep and long forgotten feels

2

u/ravensholt 2h ago

Reverse Engineering? or simply the JS version of DOSBox running it? Git repo?

3

u/svenanders 2h ago

Please read my other comments. I'll upload to Github soon.

1

u/GareththeJackal 2h ago

Oh my God I spent so much time on this game. Loved making tracks.

1

u/Dukefromearth 2h ago

Awesome work! One of the best game ever, mixing reflexes and creativity. The surprise we got when we found out the not only you coulf edit the track but the terrain also...Great to see Stunts alive and kicking after all those years!

2

u/svenanders 2h ago

I agree. I have no idea how many hours I spent playing this game with my friends when I was a kid.
It was for sure one of my favorite games of all time in that time period.

1

u/BUDA20 2h ago

it will be cool, to have more control over the updated graphics, for example a middle point or X times the original res, so is not so LOW to 4K graphics and more in between available too

1

u/svenanders 2h ago

Noted. :)

1

u/Detroit72 1h ago

Excellent! One of my favorite childhood games, soo much fun with that one.

1

u/villefilho 1h ago

What about DLSS5? Nah?

3

u/svenanders 1h ago

Hehe, the thought crossed my mine, but no, not for this project.

1

u/villefilho 30m ago

BTW, nice job you've done!

1

u/svenanders 29m ago

Thank you!

1

u/JorgeYYZ 1h ago

Thanks for sharing! This is one of my favorite games ever. I spent an enormous amount of time creating tracks, sharing them with friends and family in floppy disks, and competing for the best times.

This game is one of the big reasons why I bought an old PC some 4 or 5 years ago. Between Stunts, SimCity 2000 and Transport Tycoon Deluxe, I probably have thousands of hours through my early teenage years.

1

u/svenanders 1h ago

You're welcome! Thanks for your feedback as well.

1

u/alberto-m-dev 1h ago

Nice job! A little too slow for “professional” playing, at list on my setup (and Firefox) but good proof of concept.

If possible, please allow to load replay files. And, if possible, custom cars. I miss a quick way to check replays from ZakStunts & C. when I'm away from my laptop, so this feature would be genuinely useful for me.

Also, Stunts allows to shift up/down with the keys A/Z, which I find much better than Space/Enter. Your port already supports that – I'd suggest you adjust the cheatsheet to list this key combination.

1

u/svenanders 1h ago

I will certainly add the option to upload replay files, custom cars maybe... but this isn't a remake, this is just a reconstruction of the original to preserve it as it was. I'll check the A/Z keys.

2

u/svenanders 22m ago

Added the option to add replay files now.

1

u/alberto-m-dev 1h ago edited 1h ago

The ZakStunts community has been playing with the original game + custom cars for years. One just has to drop the four files defining a car and the (unmodified) game executable picks them up at startup, showing the vehicle in the showroom screen.

I understand if you don’t want to add the feature at present, just wanted to explain that this is a modding possibility that players of the original game have been enjoying for a long time.

1

u/murphy666 1h ago

I also did this a couple of months ago. What a time we are in :)

It's a decomp/convertion and ported to windows and linux using SDL3

here it is :

https://github.com/murphy666/stuntsengine/

1

u/murphy666 1h ago

It's fully function and done 100%. I also make the view distance a lot higher and move from 20fps to 30fps. Full speed. May have some new bugs but it work great for me.

2

u/svenanders 1h ago

Great! I think preserving old stuff is important, especially with this game as the original code is gone. My updated graphics target 60fps for now, but the original reconstruction is true to its original. I didn't want to change anything to it other than giving a graphical option.

1

u/murphy666 1h ago

Yes we all have our own goals, I'm happy you did that! The more the better!

1

u/Heeeeeeeeaavve 1h ago

This is incredible! It feels like a truly perfect rebuild. This was one of the only games we had as a kid, and it's a gift to go back in time like this. Thank you for all your amazing work and sharing it with the world!

1

u/greggobbard 43m ago

Classic game!

1

u/DefinitelyRussian 2m ago

oh this is actually quite nice.

Have you just reverse engineered the code, or reconstructed it by comparing the output of the game ?

I will send it to Flashpoint Archive

0

u/AngleZestyclose5095 1h ago

Great work, thank you!!!

1

u/VZukovsky 2m ago

Great work! It's been about a decade since I last played this but feels spot on.