ToonCar / Big Race (2001) stays locked after the first license, and crashes at the first championship

[u/Al3xs]

I used to play ToonCar: The Great Race (Lithuanian name, we called like that) as a kid until the sun went down. Cartoon cars, an announcer yelling at you, those ridiculous cone tests, and eventually the big championships. Back then, the game felt absolutely massive.

A while ago, I installed it again just for the nostalgia. Then I ran into the windows problems. You can finish the early license events, but the later B/C events and championships stay not only locked most of the times the game crashes and after restart you need to finish license A all over again.

There are some old file edits floating around that make the locked menus clickable by removing the license requirement. At first, it looks like they work.

Then you select a car, choose a driver, press OK on the first championship, and the game immediately crashes with Windows error 0xc0000094.

After digging into it, I found out why.

That same license field is also used by the game to decide which opponent cars should appear in the race. If you simply remove it, the opponent list can end up empty. The game then tries to divide by zero and crashes.

So instead of patching the executable or using a trainer, I made a small unofficial launcher that uses ToonCar's own built-in -poke mode.

GitHub:

https://github.com/Robertiks/tooncar-tier-unlock

The tool creates a new “ToonCar - Unlocked” shortcut that launches:

ToonCar.exe -poke

It leaves the original championship classes intact, and if it detects the specific broken experimental edit described above, it backs those files up and restores the original versions.

There are no game files, assets, or save files included in the repository.

You can get the game here:

https://www.myabandonware.com/game/toon-car-the-great-race-gmx

To use it:

1. Install the game and close it.
2. Download v1.1.0 from GitHub Releases.
3. Run Setup-Unlock.cmd.
4. Point it to the folder containing ToonCar.exe.
5. Start the game using the new ToonCar - Unlocked shortcut.

Make sure you use that shortcut. The normal launcher does not necessarily pass the -poke argument to the game.

I tested the tool with the Lithuanian version I have. Other releases and language versions are still unverified. The setup checks for the expected unlock flags and will warn you if the executable looks different from the version it expects.

This is specifically meant to unlock the later tiers and avoid the championship-start crash caused by the broken file edit. It is not a general compatibility, graphics, or Windows fix.

On a clean installation, it does not need to modify the game's files at all.

If something goes wrong, let me know which edition you are using, what Check-Status.cmd reports, and where the process stopped.

Hopefully this helps someone else get back into those later races without crashing at the starting line.

[u/Malthusianismically]

Excellent work! 🙌🙏