Converting NASCAR Racing 3 and NASCAR Legends tracks to Indycar Racing 2:

This tutorial describes how to convert NASCAR Racing 3 and NASCAR Legends tracks to ICR2. File definitions for N99 and N3/NL are very similar, we only need to edit the .3do files in the N3/NL track to make it work in the N99->ICR2 converter.
[you will certainly need a .dat tool, a hex editor and the N99 -> ICR2 converter]
[you might need 3doEd, an image processing program and Winmip]
1 - Pick the N3 or NL track that you want to convert to ICR2. Let's say you want to convert the fictional track Speedway. First make a backup of your N3/NL Speedway folder, because you're going to ruin your copy for that game... Then your first step would be to make a folder called temp in the Speedway folder, and copy the Speedway.dat to this temp folder. Unpack the Speedway.dat file.
2 - First some preparations for easy access to the .3do's :
            - Create a folder in your temp folder and name it 3do
            - Move all the .3do files to this folder
            - Launch your hex editor and, if possible, open all .3do files at once
3 - Now it's time to take care of the .3do's.... On the left hand part of the screen you will see a lot of numbers. Ignore them, the interesting bits are on the right. Look at the first 4 characters...they should be 3OD3. Spelt backwards it reads 3DO3 (3do file, version 3). Then there is some garbage you can ignore (actually this is vital info for the sim, but let's leave it OK ?) and on the same line PERP. Don't know what it means, but who cares, they are the vertices definitions. The next section is the one we need to tackle. It's the MRON (Normals) section. We will need to delete every MRON section in every .3do file...Take a look at the picture below.

hex1.gif (13695 bytes)

The only thing that you need to do is select the entire MRON section (the blue bit in this screenshot) and delete it. BTW, don't expect these happy colors in your hex editor, I painted them in myself to show you what I meant;)

In big files (the <track>.3do) you might want to do an ASCII search for MRON to find the MRON section. You might also have to scroll down numerous pages to find the end of the MRON section, in particular in the <track>.3do

So how do you know where the MRON section ends ? Well, where the next one begins, in this case NRTS (String section), but it can also be the MIRP section that you see here as well.

Save the file and go to the next one. Easy as that !

 

4 -  If your track is not a standard N3 or NL one, there might be some objects that don't have a MRON section at all, these don't need changing so just close them and move on to the next one. When you are done with all the .3do's, put all the .3do's back in the temp folder.
5 - Repack the Speedway.dat and put it back in the Speedway folder.
6 - Start up the N99->ICR2 convertor and convert the track to ICR2. If you did everything right there should be no problem. Go into the game to see if it worked well and how the track looks.
7 - Chances are your track will look fine, in that case continue to the 'how to make a converted track look better' tutorial. There might be a particular problem though, at some tracks the graphics will look fine up close but will have a weird color on objects that are further away. This means your .mip files are slightly messed up. It's easy to fix:
Use Winmip to convert all .mip's to .bmp and convert them from .bmp straight back to .mip, repack the .dat and the problem should be solved. When you repack the .dat you will see that it has become bigger in size. This is a good thing, the extra -lower resolution- images have been added to the .mip files and your track is now fine.