Gold's menus all match, and the extra cars get in

2026-10-24, the front end's session.

Ten captures, ten matches

The reference is now POD Gold 2.8 in English. Ten captures of the screens pod-ui ports had been taken in the emulated PC. Before this session four matched exactly. The car screen and the records were off by a few dim pixels at the bottom and the right, and the track pages by thousands.

The dim pixels came from the captures. The capture's row 478 repeats row 477 of the frame, and its columns 636 to 638 show columns 635 to 637. This is measured: on the car screen and the records the backgrounds differ there, and every differing pixel equals its neighbour in our frame. The emulated PC's display seems to scale the window by a pixel. Earlier in the day a rule had been fitted to the pointer, as if the game repeated the pointer's last row when it reached the bottom edge. It was the same edge effect, so the rule is gone. The test now shows our frame the way the capture shows it, and the pointer is drawn as the game clips it. A know-how entry records the trap: capture-edge-rows-repeat.

The track pages were a real difference. The track screen had been ported from the first edition, where the page arrows, PREVIOUS and OK are in a state that draws nothing until pressed, so the background shows. Gold's handler (0x4a509c) and page fill (0x4a4148), read in its code, set them differently. The arrows are hidden when there is no page that way, but a hidden button still draws its picture. PREVIOUS and OK are selectable. Each digit gets its own picture for both of its states. One more fix followed in our drawing. A lit digit was hidden because two of its picture slots were now equal, and the code compared slot numbers where the original takes a branch.

With these, all ten captures match: the main menu (two), one player, options, both track pages, the car screen, pause, the quit warning and the records.

The extra cars reach the race

The extras session installs fan and web cars by adding them to VOITURE2.BIN. The question was how Gold's car screen shows them. It does not: its arrows go round the eight cars of VOITURES.BIN. Its "Load new car" button opens menu 25. There the player picks one of the eight and trades it for a car of VOITURE2.BIN, and OK writes both lists. Reset brings back VOIRESET.BIN's eight. The handler and its six actions are read in Gold's code and ported. With the extras' content folder, all 49 added cars appear on the screen with their pictures and figures. One quirk of the original is kept: reset looks at only the first eight records of the old list, so in a longer list some records past the rewrite stay where they were.

The options buttons

Gold's options actions are ported with their Ubi.ini writes. The difficulty button also sets the damage: normal brings global damage, hard sector damage, easy none. The damage button then steps within what the difficulty allows. The music and sound effects buttons show a volume field with two arrows. There are also Dolby, the intro and stereo lists, the opponent count and the credits video. The typed fields (volume, players' names) use a modal text editor that is not ported yet.

Next

The garage (menu 26), whose handler is read in part. It loads the car's five settings and the five saved set-ups of Params\<car>.prb, and it shows the car in 3D. Then the options' sub-screens (controls, graphics) and the race-end screens, whose Gold captures exist. Captures of the car swap, the garage and the controls screens have been asked of the race-loop session.