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And by the way, while it looks like these tracks from the HDD of this computer are probably not going to be that functional, just a reminder that I found and was able to backup a floppy disk that had valid working tracks my family made that were in most instances, even older than the pack of corrupt tracks.   https://forum.stunts.hu/index.php?topic=4200.0

So, I ran an entropy test (results in attached .csv file) on all your .trk files to quickly assess which ones, if any, are indeed just random garbage, and the answer regrettably appears to be "almost all of them". Normal Stunts track files have an entropy of around 2 bits per bytes, while these recovered files average over 6 bits per byte, with many close to the limit of 8 bits per byte (pure randomness). Two files (~F2249.TRK and ~F2265.TRK) have 0 entropy as they are completely blank. There are some files in between these two extremes, indicating that they may be candidates for more advanced recovery, but almost all of them appear to just be blocks of random garbage with strings of null bytes in between. Only one file (~F2323.TRK) seems to contain a "valid" Stunts track, in that it contains valid track pieces and loads correctly in the in-game editor, though it's just a collection of seemingly random track pieces filling two-thirds of the map, with the remaining third of the map completely blank. I don't think you can do much with it.

ETA: Some of these files seem to contain regular data structures aligned to 16-byte boundaries, which appear to be neither random garbage nor track data. Possibly recoverable data from other files entirely? ETA: Confirmed: ~F2269.TRK definitely isn't a Stunts track: it's a perfectly intact fragment of your SYSTEM.INI file! If you had any personal or sensitive information on this PC, some of it may be in these files, so you may want to take it down.

Thanks for the heads up.  I'm not that concerned about personal/sensitive information being in these files.  This computer is so old that it predates things like us using the internet for financial transactions. And even if there was something there, it would for the most part be completely obsolete, as things like the banks we used to have accounts at 30 years ago simply don't exist in the current day, the people who used this pc don't live at the same addresses as back then, etc. Thanks for analyzing the files and letting me know its mostly junk data.  I did start to have that hunch when dragging a few of them into a text editor and seeing how the gibberish didn't look like the same type of gibberish as a valid trk file.  I'll leave the archive up for a little bit in case anyone here still wants to check them out for crazy recovery purposes but I won't leave it up forever.

By the way, the original stunts tracks that  come with the game are in here as well, I think with the first letter is generally missing such as _elens for Helens. That may be a source of comparison for how a file might be different from its original state in case there remains any commonality between the bad version of the original tracks in this archive and good versions of those files from a regular copy of stunts.  Or maybe it'll just prove the bad version is full of junk data and bits of other files and there is nothing to do lol

and none of them worked,

They work with Track Blaster. Pictures attached with ~F2269. Looks good. I guess I can't drive on it though.

Interesting. I've never used that program, but I'll run the files through them in case there is something that looks like a realistic segment of a track.

OK! I got the files back today.  I sorted all the stunts tracks/highscores etc into a directory. Some of the names seem messed up but there are also files that don't have messed up names.

Anyway I tried to load about 10 of them, including several with good looking file names, and a few with bad ones, and none of them worked, and they either wound up freezing or crashing stunts and/or dosbox so things aren't looking too great lol.  Not sure how to edit these in a hex editor to try and make them somewhat loadable, but I'm throwing them up here in case anyone wants to play around with recovering these to a semi useable state   They might also just be junk data at this point?  Some of the files recovered from this drive, such as ordinary readme.txt files included with software just show up as gibberish when they are opened... however there are some good working files as well...

Anything that might become loadable that appears to be an incomplete track, I'll happily try to finish into something complete-able.

Hi guys, as a Christmas present to myself, I recently hired a data recovery service to try and recover data from the old defunct nonworking HDD from my first computer circa 1993. The recovery service had better luck than I had with my amateur data recovery efforts, and they sent over a file list to show what they recovered from the drive.  Judging from the file types, some of my old Stunts tracks were recovered!

The catch is, that the HDD partition was damaged and the recovery included recovering a mix of good files and damaged/partial files.  I'm yet to receive my recovered data back, but looking at the stunts files I've seen in the file listing, the vast majority of the stunts track files have messed up names, such as "_rack1" instead of "track1", which is a nomenclature I've seen before when recovering damaged (and ultimately nonworking) files from floppy disks. So I assume many of my stunts tracks will be among the damaged/partial files from the recovery. 

When I get the files back (in a few days), I will certainly test them and may upload them here, but I guess I'm wondering - if I have a partial file, might there be any conceivable way to repair it so that I could see what remains of it within Stunts?  Like maybe combining the data I have from the partial file with data from a working stunts track?  In any case, I suppose I'll check that out to see what can be done.  Expecting to actually have the data back in a few days...

I recently inherited a large collection of dos-era floppies from a nice guy who was looking to move them on.  One of the floppies was a bootleg copy of Stunts, and more importantly, had a small collection of custom tracks that were made circa 1996-1998.

Anyways, in the interest of preservation and getting them to people who might enjoy them, I thought it would be fun to upload them in case anyone else here would like to play these rare tracks from back in the day

Here's a preview of some of them.

PS I've shared this topic with the guy the disks came from, so feel free to let him know what you think 

Could you get around the track save limit by dragging some saved tracks out of the directory, and then saving some new ones, and then swapping stuff in and out when you wanted to use it?  Super clunky compared to scrolling through dozens of tracks in Stunts, but at least you could share tracks with others and also maintain more than 3-5 tracks then, right?

Does hard drivin 2 exist??

Yes, but not as the smooth arcade game everyone loves (the sequel to that in the arcades was Race Drivin').  In between arcade release of Hard Drivin' and Race Drivin', Domark puts out "Hard Drivin' II" for Dos (and maybe Amiga and AtariST).  Performance is OK for a dos game of 1991, but compared to stunts or Hard Drivin' arcade, it is worse graphics.  It has the one track that existed in Hard Drivin', plus 3 or 4 new tracks that are only seen in this game, which are not the same as the added tracks in Race Drivin'.  In addition, it has the track editor, which allows you to create your own tracks using the hard drivin' pieces, including loops and jumps and the other stunt pieces that exist in the Hard Drivin' track.

I found an old reference to someone using the HD2 track editor. Supposedly you may need to add "checkpoints" to your track in order for the editor to allow you to play it.

This might technically belong in a different subforum, but what the heck, I'll put it here since this is the most active subforum.

I was checking out Hard Drivin' II, the dos port, which as you might expect, is derived from the Hard Drivin' arcade game. I knew there were dos ports of Hard Drivin' and Race Drivin', but what I didn't know is that...... Hard Drivin' II has a full featured track editor with dozens of tracks/objects that can be placed on the terrain, akin to the Stunts track editor.

Stunts does many things better than this game (better framerate, better draw distance, more cars, hills/water in terrain), but HD2 does some things Stunts does not, such as greater variety in the radius of the turn tracks you can place.

I haven't exhaustively tried out HD2's editor, but what gives? Unlike Stunts, there is no indication of any HD2 community or custom levels ever being uploaded anywhere.

I suppose the same could be said about Stunt pipsqueak, another dos pipsqueak with the ability to make custom stunt tracks... but at least in HD2's case, I would have thought this game was somewhat popular through the relationship to the highly popular and well known arcade game...

Anyone else tried HD2's editor, or made custom tracks in it?

By the way, I have been playing some stunts on my 386 and for whatever reason, Stunts 1.1 crashes immediately after the "loading stunts" message and locks up the machine.  It is a good version that I've used successfully in dosbox...  I used my disks to install the original copy I have - that appears to be version 1.0 and that works just fine, I wonder why.

Hello everyone, I've added the latest version of my track archive to the first post, as well as this one. 

There is one new track in the JON92-94 directory, I think it is John6.trk, but the real stuff is in the ROB92-94 directory, where there are, I think, 30 or so new tracks and one new replay made by my brother, who in general, put greater effort into track making than I did.  I hope someone has the time to give some of these a spin!

More pics

In a rare sighting, the elusive Stunts paper manual in its natural habitat, hunting copy protection prompts  Great to see!

I was trying to guess them from the 5 or so that I remember, and then I remembered I could readily look them up as I had gotten the box with manual out next to me in order to get the diskettes!  I always wanted to say "track" for this prompt.  This one is a curveball though as you enter the adjective before the word "track".

You have 386 CPU, but you don't have CRT monitor.

https://forum.stunts.hu/index.php?topic=4257.msg92988#msg92988

Also, the aspect ratio is wrong. For Stunts, it should be 4:3.

Oh don't worry my friend, this was just a lightweight monitor that was easily available. I still have the 1991 era 4x3 CRT monitor that we used with this PC. I will pull it out and use it once I get the PC fully fixed up. Right now I need to take the top case off regularly as I deal with replacing and testing hardware and didn't want to have to deal with lugging it off and on the PC each time. 😉

This stretched display is what the monitor defaulted to.

More pics

I have managed to recover the entire disk by... Of all things... Fixing up the old 1991 386 PC we used to play Stunts on, and reading it with the ancient disk drive in regular Dos (same drive we used to write the disk actually). I've got the files transferred over to my modern PC and will upload them soon. Bonus pic, running Stunts from floppy disk on my old 386! 

The disk is definitely messed up. At one point it crashed the old PC with lots of gibberish flooding the screen and lots of PC speaker beeps, I've never seen a floppy read error go bananas like that, but with many many repeated tries I was able to get everything off it.

Just chiming in to say that I think the remake shown in the video looks great from a graphics perspective. Very nice to have a far/unlimited draw distance and non flickering polygons, yet with models that look like the old stuff.  The car suspension seems much more bouncy than the dos game, but I'd totally download this and thoroughly play it if there were a public download.