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Glitch
Sped up timer


Info
A glitch in Carmageddon
Location Any level
Reproducibility High
Cause Engine
Harmless No


C·V·D·E
Icon C3 stupid The title of this article or section is conjectural.
This means that it's not an official name.

Back when the first game was released, mid-90s machines had just enough power to run the game at a playable speed. Unfortunately, since then technology has come on leaps and bounds: Modern computers can run Carmageddon easily... too easily. The normal framerate can reach speeds of over 250 FPS, and Carmageddon's timer runs according to it.

How-to[]

The only things needed to witness this glitch is a modern computer. Anything with a Pentium III processor or above is enough.

Effects[]

The timer should run way faster than normal. About 3 timer seconds should be elapsed in a real second, making races really difficult.

Explanation[]

As explained above, the timer runs according to the frame rate, for some reason. So, when the game is running at ~60FPS, the timer practically works well. But if the frames reach around 300...

Strangely, all other timers, like the powerups' time period, do not depend on the game's speed. To make matters worse, there doesn't seem to be any patch on the Internet to fix this problem. There are some workarounds, though.

Solutions[]

For Windows, the best solution is to make use of the cnc-ddraw library. Drop ddraw.dll into the Carmageddon folder where carm95.exe resides. When the game is started, a ddraw.ini file will be created and can be fully configured. For the DOS version, apply the patch from dosemu project to carma.exe.

Speaking of DOSBox, one can use it to run the game and throttle the speed, allowing for normal play.

Alternately, there are some minor solutions. Purposely lagging the game can make it run slower, and thus, make the time run slower. Some ways to do this include setting all the options to their highest parameters (some of them can even be changed in the game's files to allow values far greater than the limit) or attach some CPU consuming applications to Carmageddon's process.

See also[]

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