I would like to know what this mystical FIX.EXE [md5 4bb9efea85a2aa211042b202f1dadd51] in the Redneck Rampage directory is and what is its function.

It seemingly does nothing as it produces no output, but I'm sure it's meant for something, given its name.

I don't have the option to check if the original game came with this or not, but I'm quite certain it didn't. If anyone could check that for me, I'd appreciate it.

Assuming the original game doesn't come with it, I guess my only option is hearing it from the GOG team, but if anyone has any idea of this odd executable, please let me know, thanks!

I would like to know too :)

It's presumably fix or patch to incorrect game behaviour it was shipped since retail version (no limit water breathing or crash at the ufo entering, along with other stuff (lag when in corridors or certain sound is played).

But the thing is it doesn't patch any of the files or stay on for runtime changes.

I did notice that if you don't use it, the game hangs up when quitting the game, but other than that it's a completely mystery.

I would really like to know some in-depth details about this thing.

You can enable some logging by adding any argument to the fix.exe command line and adding a pause command after it like so (in dosboxRR_single.conf and dosbox66_single.conf):

cls
fix.exe log
pause

The actual argument you pass doesn't matter...fix.exe is only checking that the argument count is equal to 1. Pause just causes the script to wait for you to press a key, so you can read the output of fix.exe.

When you run the expansion pack, it renames some files and patches the rr.exe executable to run the expansion pack version instead of the default RR version. It does this in the route66.exe program, which then runs the patched rr.exe. When you run fix.exe and route66, you can see the timestamp on rr.exe changing each time as it's patched.

fix.exe fixes all that and resets the game to the default "Redneck Rampage" configuration. If you add the log argument and the pause command, you can see it testing and renaming various files, but it only renames them after you've run route66 at least once.

In order to simplify things, the GoG folks just added fix.exe to both scripts, to make sure the game gets set to a default state each time. So if you comment out fix.exe, and run route66, things will be really weird when you try to run plain old Redneck Rampage.

In other words, don't take out fix.exe!