This project is an attempt to reimplement the classic Macintosh shareware game Reckless Drivin' as a cross-platform game. The source code of the original game was released by the author Jonas Echterhoff in 2019, but relies heavily on deprecated Macintosh system calls for most aspects of the game. Additionally, the game data (sprites, sounds, level data, etc.) are all LZRW3 compressed inside the resource fork of the original game, which is an additional barrier to reimplementation.
The original source may be found at https://github.com/jechter/RecklessDrivin.
Update: I am finished porting all my work in C to Zig. Overall I am very pleased with the rewrite, and I appreciate all of the little improvements to the code that were lacking in C, like knowing the length of a slice without resorting to offsets and weird fat pointer tricks I was using previously.
At this stage, the game is not playable. But at startup all of the data is decompressed and loaded into memory, and then promptly freed before exiting. The next step is to start the game loop! I have chosen to ignore the main menu for now so we can get a playable game as soon as possible.
The original source contained a file called Data containing the resource fork.
This has been converted into a header file (src/include/data) to be embedded
in the executable directly. This file contains various "Packs" of data including
Apple QuickDraw images, sounds, sprites, and fonts. Work has been done to
reliably read, decompress, decrypt, and interpret the data from this resource
fork.
As an indicator of progress, PPic Packs 1000 through 1008 (the Apple QuickDraw images) have been read from the resource fork. This verifies that the lzrw-3a decompression is working, and is a exciting marker of progress! See the images on the wiki.
So far I have only built Open Reckless Drivin' on Arch Linux, but I see no reason why it wouldn't work elsewhere. Using the latest stable version of Zig:
zig build
The binary will be placed in zig-out/bin/reckless-drivin. Run with the
register [name] option to generate a new activation code.
To run tests
zig build test
Jonas released the game for free after it was no longer viable to update it for modern systems. More information can be found on the game's website. The free registration information is:
Name: Free
Code: B3FB09B1EB