Crash Team Racing's 60 FPS widescreen mod is finally available to download, after 2 years of work and over 1000 hours of testing. The amazing news was broken just a few days ago via a 1 minute 30 trailer on the Crash Bandicoot preservationist/modder Darkaiser's YouTube channel and only recently came to our attention earlier today thanks to the fine folks over at RetroDodo.
The mod is the work of the engineers Niko, Faradise, Redhot, and Super, as well as a group of over 10 testers (including Darkraiser), and does exactly what it says on the tin, improving the framerate from the 30FPS of the original to a buttery smooth 60FPS and enabling the ability to play the game in 16x9 widescreen. There's even a separate 60FPS patch available for the standard 4x3, just in case you want to mod the game without upgrading to widescreen.
According to the video description on Darkraiser's video, the project is "the most logically complex mod ever built into CTR" and was made possible thanks to a new initiative in the community, which has seen modders take advantage of a rewrite of the PS1 game's source code.
The hope is that, in the future, all of the mods they create using this new rewrite could be combined into a potential "super-mod" to assemble the definitive Crash Team Racing experience or help build a user-friendly Mod Launcher to let players pick and choose what improvements they'd like to play with.
If you want to give the mod a try, you can download it now from the link in Darkraiser's video description. You'll need a copy of the game and the PS1 emulator Duckstation installed to get it up and running.