akitaonrails

In the first article of the series I showed the launcher for Colin McRae Rally from 1998: a thin layer around the original executable that makes the game run at 4K, widescreen and 60 fps on a modern PC, with REA doing the reverse engineering. In the second, this morning, I repeated the recipe on half a dozen more racing games: Colin McRae 3, 04 and DiRT, OutRun 2006, Sega Rally Revo and the Screamer trilogy.

After building these launchers to bring back my favorite games, I wanted more people to be able to do the same with their games. So I put it all together in a framework: rea-launcher-sdk.

I liked the launcher’s result a lot, and the most interesting part was realizing how easy the recipe was to repeat. So I decided to bring more abandonware back into the modern era. Between the night of October 31 and the early hours of November 2, six more launchers came out, covering eight racing games:

Colin McRae Rally 3 (2003) Colin McRae Rally 04 (2004 on PC) Colin McRae: DiRT (2007) OutRun 2006: Coast 2 Coast (2006) Sega Rally Revo (2007) the Screamer trilogy (1995 to 1997), from the MS-DOS era

Now Gemini 4 Argon, GPT-6.1 Sol, GPT-6.1 Terra, Kimi K3.1 Pro, and Claude Sonnet 5.5 have joined the ranking. All five landed in Tier A.

I suspect this will be my last commercial ranking update, or close to it. The models have become too similar.