Would love to see multiplayer support extended a bit. I have a knack for the original DOS-version so I'd vote for IPX on DOS but if a modern approach with a Windows version and TCP/IP is easier to implement I'd be more than happy as well 😉.

Back in the day I did play few multiplayer sessions with my brother and friends but since it's quite limited the fun diminished quickly (not to mention I usually won 😜). I'd love to see if multiplayer could be joined with the standard AI ranking. No 9-map limit and just sign up for the races and fill the gaps with AI (i.e. play with 3 people and one computer/AI player). I also remember that money prizes were different in the multiplayer version which led to the fact that the person who won the first race already had a huge advantage over the second race so there is little chance for the other players to win the second race.

I'm not a coder so I can't really help out on the source-code stuff but I'd be more than happy to test and validate 😀.

I tried it once years ago and it kept crashing. It's decompiled from the 2010 windows release (and holy shit that's a mess)

Reminder that Github will default to MIT licensing and is often erroneously applied without licensing literacy, so I wouldn't trust this for any legal endeavors.

leileilol wrote on 2026-08-18, 21:58:

I tried it once years ago and it kept crashing. It's decompiled from the 2010 windows release (and holy shit that's a mess)

Reminder that Github will default to MIT licensing and is often erroneously applied without licensing literacy, so I wouldn't trust this for any legal endeavors.

It looks deliberate: https://github.com/urxp/dRally/blob/master/LICENSE#L3

1Copyright (c) 2019 Neomalius (urxp)

Really don't see why you would bother with this, or the other one ( https://github.com/enriquesomolinos/DreeRally ). Just play the original in DOSBox or the Windows port (in WINE if on Linux).

The bugs in the Windows version are annoying so it would be nice to have a native version with less issues, but I doubt those seemingly abandoned open source projects are it.

Projects like this always pique my interest because sometimes you can find absolute bangers like these DOS backports of Quake 1 and 2:
https://dk.toastednet.org/QDOS/
https://dk.toastednet.org/Q2DOS/

Death Rally is very dear to me. Having a way to compile a native executable would perfectly fit into this ebuild:

1EAPI=8
2
3DESCRIPTION="Each race is deadly contest - a matter of life or death."
4HOMEPAGE="https://www.remedygames.com/games/death-rally"
5# cannibalize freeware Windows release for game assets - they seem to work OK with DOS port :)
6# cannibalize shareware release for baseline for the game
7SRC_URI="
8        https://archive.org/download/death-rally-win-10/DeathRallyWin_10.exe
9        https://archive.org/download/1rally/1ral11.zip
10"
11LICENSE="freeware"
12RESTRICT="bindist mirror"
13KEYWORDS="~amd64 ~x86 ~arm64 ~ppc64"
14SLOT="0"
15
16REQUIRED_USE=""
17RDEPEND="
18        games-emulation/dosbox
19        sys-apps/coreutils
20"
21DEPEND="${RDEPEND}"
22BDEPEND="
23        app-arch/unzip
24        app-arch/7zip
25        sys-apps/coreutils
26        media-gfx/icoutils
27        dev-util/bsdiff
28"
29S="${WORKDIR}/death-rally-${PV}"
30
31src_unpack() {
32        mkdir "${S}"
33        7z e -o "${S}"  "${DISTDIR}/DeathRallyWin_10.exe" DR.ICO ENDANI.haf ENDANI0.HAF ENGINE.BPA IBFILES.BPA MENU.BPA MUSICS.BPA SANIM.haf TR0.BPA TR1.BPA TR2.BPA TR3.BPA TR4.BPA TR5.BPA TR6.BPA TR7.BPA TR8.BPA TR9.BPA
34        unzip -d "${S}" "${DISTDIR}/1ral11.zip" "${S}/DRSW11.SHR"
35        unzip -d "${S}" "${S}/DRSW11.SHR" "${S}/RALLY.EXE"
36        rm "${S}/DRSW11.SHR"
37        mv "${S}/RALLY.EXE" "${S}/RALLYSHR.EXE"
38}
39
40src_compile() {
41        icotool -x DR.ICO -o com.apogee.death-rally.png
42        rm DR.ICO
43# transforms shareware 1.1 exe into registered 1.1 nocd exe taken from gamecopyworld.com
44# good luck finding it!
45        bspatch RALLYSHR.EXE RALLY.EXE "${FILESDIR}/death-rally-1.1-reg-nocd.bspatch"
46        rm RALLYSHR.EXE
47}
48
49src_install() {
50        dobin "${FILESDIR}/death-rally"
51        insinto /usr/share/death-rally
52        doins RALLY.EXE ENDANI.haf ENDANI0.HAF ENGINE.BPA IBFILES.BPA MENU.BPA MUSICS.BPA SANIM.haf TR0.BPA TR1.BPA TR2.BPA TR3.BPA TR4.BPA TR5.BPA TR6.BPA TR7.BPA TR8.BPA TR9.BPA
53        insinto /usr/share/icons/hicolor/32x32/apps
54        doins com.apogee.death-rally.png
55        insinto /usr/share/applications
56        doins "${FILESDIR}/com.apogee.death-rally.desktop"
57}

If you can see what is going on here, it means that the only part we can't get from legit sources is the executable.

The keywords list reflects on everything I have at the moment, so I can use it:
- on my PowerMac G5
- on my Dual Tualatin
- on my Ryzen
- on my RPI5
- on my PS3

It'd probably work on RISCV too if it's got enough horsepower to run DOSBox. One thing I learned last year when daily driving a RPI4 for 2 weeks is that it's severely underpowered to run more demanding games, like GTA1 and Rayman in DOSBox even without sound. The RPI5 has more power and manages these games fine. It's still a tax we pay for no other reason than that the game simply isn't open source.

Efforts like this, offer an opportunity to invest the extra work and make the emulation tax go completely away for our beloved games. For that I think it's worth it.