The extra cars and tracks

2026-10-24, the extras session.

The download that holds the POD Gold disc also has POD - Extra Cars (51 zips) and POD - Extra Tracks (50). Some are Gold's own content repackaged for the 3dfx build, seven are OEM forms of Gold's tracks, and the rest come from fans and the old web site: QBall's Banana and Night, Leadbest's Newsance, the Witnessteam's reskin of Slimepit. Our readers failed on 21 of their files. The question for each was what WINPOD.EXE does with it.

What the game tolerates

Every failure came from our readers being stricter than the game. Each change follows Gold's code (observed):

• Texture names. The scan that finds texture blocks looks for .tga names. F1, F2 and F3 name their first texture Pneu-pluie.TG` , and Parc and Down name prop textures .bmp. read_texture_block never looks at a name, so the readers now read each block where the file puts it.
• "neant". Forest and Tron write the empty section name in lower case. load_track_file compares it with FUN_004c805c, a compare that ignores case. The sub-readers use the exact strcmp.
• Gaps. Arcade and Forest have 0x38 zero bytes between entries. The game seeks every entry through the table and never checks where the last one stopped.
• Bytes after a picture. ECocoon's picture has 277 bytes after its pixels. Gold's load_menu_images makes four reads and closes the file.

Two cases are worse than tolerated. The OEM tracks CanyOEM and PompOEM declare fewer animated faces than they hold. Gold's 0x463c8c sizes its buffer by the declared count and writes one record per face with no bound, so the original writes past its allocation. Forest's reverse track starts 0x38 bytes late; a reverse race would read its name as the start of the data.

Eight files are broken for the game itself:

• two .BL3 files are empty in their zips;
• ED's and Homard's .BV3 are copies of their .BV4, whose 16-bit pages the 8-bit build would read past the end of the file;
• a 1997 copy of an installed game holds Lagoon and Stock in an older layout.

Everything else, 482 files, reads and writes back byte for byte (docs/extras.md).

How the CD Patcher installed them

Ubi Soft's CDPatcher.exe (1997) is in the download. Decompiled, without running it, its install loop copies a track's .bl3 or .bl4 into the install folder. It picks the .bl4 when it finds one of five programs there, the 3D-card builds. It also copies the picture to Mimg, the sound bank to Resson and any best times to Records, and adds the row to circuits.bin or voiture2.bin.

pod-extras install does the same. Gold's own buffers set two limits. load_circuit_list keeps 96 rows. VOITURE2.BIN goes into a 0x1000-byte buffer, which holds 32 cars, and Gold already has 8. So WINPOD.EXE gets the five new tracks that have a .BL3 and 24 of the 41 new cars. The 3dfx build gets 34 tracks. Most fan tracks after 1998 only shipped a .BL4, which the patcher would have installed for the 3dfx build alone.

In Un-POD

Read over the disc, the installed folder gave Un-POD's live race the fan track Hellway, with the seven computer cars on their own controllers:

Then, agreed with the app's session, unpod --content DIR reads the installed folder over the disc. A track with only a .BL4 is read from it, so Arcade and Tron race too. The front end ported Gold's car swap, which offers all 49 VOITURE2.BIN cars, and its track screen pages through all 66 circuits. The swap's lists are written into the content folder, as the original writes them into its install folder. The start grids of Tron, Arcade and Beach are still wrong.

In the original

Later the same day the race-loop session ran the software install in the emulated PC. Gold's own track screen showed a third page with Beach, Fallen, Hellway, Iceberg and Night, the car swap offered the new cars, and a race on Beach with the fan car LORIS ran:

The fan tracks' grids

In the afternoon three fan tracks still started badly in Un-POD: Tron's cars fell, Arcade's stood stacked, and on Beach the view was inside the scenery. Projected onto the track's faces, every start record of the three sits on the floor, as Beltane's do. The app session found the cause for two: our track world read the wrong word of the .BL4 faces, so tracks that only have a .BL4 lost their ground. Since that fix, Tron's cars stand on their grid and Arcade races (docs/extras.md has the details):

Tron races alone below HARD, because its EASY and MEDIUM opponent lists are "NEANT". Beach's grid is right as well. Gold's capture shows the player last, in a narrow sand corridor, and Un-POD's own chase camera, 14 units behind the car, ends up inside the rock. The fix is the game's camera (FUN_0042b6c0), not yet ported.