Carmageddon (dethrace)

Game: Carmageddon → (Windows, 1997)

Dethrace: a reverse-engineered reconstruction of Carmageddon’s code so it runs natively on modern systems. It starts from the Watcom debug symbols of an earlier internal build, found on the Splat Pack expansion CD; crayzkirk matched them by hand to the DOS executable, and from there a C skeleton was generated that’s being filled in function by function. Since 0.10.0 it also builds with Visual C++ 4.20 and is compared instruction by instruction with the Windows 95 CARM95.EXE through reccmp, the LEGO Island decompilation’s tool; every function and global variable is tagged with its address in it. It uses the code of BRender 1.3.2, since released, instead of its reconstructed version, with the original software renderer and the original 3dfx path on OpenGL. The full game, the Splat Pack expansion, and the free demos work, with the original 640×480 high-resolution mode, CD music in the GOG release’s format, network play, cutscenes, the original CD and censorship checks, which can be turned on, and the option to run physics every frame (the original did it every 40 ms, causing camera judder in slow corners); the frame rate cap can be changed or removed. There are builds for 32- and 64-bit Windows, x86-64 and ARM64 Linux, and macOS. The latest is 0.10.1 (February 22).

You needThe files from your own copy of Carmageddon (from the original CD or GOG’s Carmageddon Max Pack), with Splat Pack if you have it; the free Carmageddon and Splat Pack demos work too. It goes in the game folder, next to CARMA.EXE (on Windows, with SDL2.dll), or the folder is set in a dethrace.ini file. Plus Windows, Linux, or macOS.

How it gets to PC

Port of a decompilation

Console

Microsoft Windows

Original studio

Stainless Software

Year

1997

Author

dethrace-labs

Stars

1.2k

Last activity

2026-10-23 · 8 days ago

Latest version

v0.10.1 · 2026-02-22

License

GPL-3.0

Language

C

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