The Making of Micro Machines | Hacker News Reader

The Making of Micro Machines

readonlymemory.com

142 pointsTomte34 comments

When people are speaking about technology from 30+ years ago, they often get the details wrong...

> ‘I knew the C64 inside out and the NES has the same processor so, in some ways it was very similar,’ says Graham. ‘The NES was character based, it had sprites the same as the C64, it was a bit faster. You could only access 64k at a time, though, so we had to bank in and out of memory buffers ’

Not 64K. While that is the size of the address bus, a NES cartridge can only realistically use address range 6000-FFFF on the cartridge. (Yes you can use 4020-5FFF as well, but that requires additional address decoding logic so it was seldom done). For the mapper that Codemasters used, the 16KB bank 8000-BFFF was switchable, and the 16KB bank C000-FFFF was the fixed bank at the end of the ROM, and 4020-7FFF was unused (open bus)

> 'The company was on the verge of mass manufacturing its European cartridges when a serious bug was discovered in the code. ‘It turned out that if you pressed brake or reverse on the starting grid the game just crashed,’ says Graham. ‘QA wasn’t what it is now and nobody had ever tried that before. Codemasters had already manufactured tens of thousands of ROMs with this bug in, so in order to get it to work, they put some of the Game Genie hardware into the cartridge which would change the one byte of the code that contained the bug – that’s how they fixed it.'

Has anyone ever found a photo of the "Game Genie Patch" version of Micro Machines? I can't find any photos of the cartridge board that uses that fix.

I wonder if it was the actual game genie, or just the same concept. If you're just modifying a single byte at a single address, of a fixed ROM, you could easily throw something minimal together with a handful of transistors/resistors.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240926164156/https://readonlym...

A friend and I would play the Sega Megadrive version.

There was one track - sand, around water, started going left - which we both loved. The normal race was IIRC 3 laps. But this track could be unlapped. So we would start and by mutual agreement go backwards to increase the number of race laps. Once we got where we wanted, 10 laps, we would line up at the start and do the 3,2,1....

OT: Same guy wanted to emigrate to Canada to be a truck driver. CA said No, don't need you. He trained as a nurse (3 years), Canada said yes. Last I heard he's trucking along.

> OT: Same guy wanted to emigrate to Canada to be a truck driver. CA said No, don't need you.

That's because he didn't follow the standard Canadian truck driver immigration pathway - come to Canada on a visitor's visa, pay an immigration company for a LMIA assessment to get issued a work permit, and bribe a driving instructor to get a license.

I had the Game Gear version, it wasn’t great sadly. Most games for that console weren’t, for some reason. Or at least the ones I had. I had much more fun with the GameBoy despite being technically inferior.

Castle of Illusion was great though

The Sonic games were epic.

Hmm I disagree, at least Sonic 2 which is the one I had was far from great IMO. The Sonic sprite was too big and the “camera” followed him so when he jumped you couldn’t see where you’d land.

I also had the original Sonic for the MegaDrive/Genesis and that one was great.

A story about reverse engineering the Micro Machines v3 format to create an editor… http://bradders.org/MMs/

(not my work)

That's mine! :-)

I still play fairly frequently.

Just this week we had a gathering of 7 people, playing MMv3 all on one big screen, with modified levels burned to a CDROM, using a PS2 with the sticky tape hack. It was awesome!

AMA

Awesome!

Back in the day, I reverse engineered the level format of v2. I Understood the graphics and physics attributes, but never how the waypoint system worked. (in multiplayer, if you take too big of a shortcut you’ll be penalized by being “popped”)

Can you explain how the waypoint system works in v3?

For the human players, the map has a data layer where every tile has a number. Tiles not on the track are 0 and tiles along the course are numbered in ascending order.

The game tracks the last numbered tile each player was on. When the players are too far apart so that they can't all fit on the same screen, then the players who have the smallest number get popped / killed. So if you cut a corner, then you're taking a risk -- you might be further ahead visually, but since you left the course, your last waypoint number will be lower than players still on the course. Those players can swerve in the other direction to force the issue and kill you, if they're paying attention.

In another data section, some of the numbered tiles are marked as key waypoints (my term, I don't know what the Codemaster devs called this). If you miss a key waypoint block entirely, then you are popped for cutting too much.

Those two mechanisms work together to encourage a kind of "iterated prisoners dilemma", on top of the normal racing mechanics. It's great fun.

There are some screenshots that illustrate this at https://bradders.org/MMs/ -- see the section titled "Cutting corners"

For AI players, there's a data layer telling them which way to go next on each tile, much like is described in the OP article here in MMs v1.

Thank you!

From your descriptions, it seems likely that the same system was used in the earlier games.

While I'm pretty sure that all versions of this game are pretty good, the N64 version in particular holds a special place in my heart. There was a way you could play it with 8 players on 4 controllers, with each person using half of a controller, and it was so much confusing fun! Often, at least at the start of a race, we'd only play a couple seconds before the game had to reset all the players to be back on the track, since things just went so fast that it was challenging to follow your car and keep it in bounds. So much fun!

https://www.analogue.co/3d

This is interesting. I wonder if this will get in hot waters with Nintendo. They're not the gentle kind when it comes to IP.

I'm guessing they'll wait for them to start shipping products before they invest in the legal show stoppers.

They already sell a Game Boy-like and a SNES-like.

As long as it is not called Nintendo 64, there is no way Nintendo can do anything.

The cartridge slot and the hardware architecture cannot be protected under copyright and any patent filed at the time would have expired anyway.

The Mega Drive version was the same, with extra controller ports on the cartridge.

I have happy memories of playing it in a smelly, beer soaked, shared house at uni.

I had a blast playing that game when I was a kid - as I recall it struck a good balance between simple, accessible controls while also being challenging (and without being frustrating). The gold cartridge rather than the typical NES cartridge probably also lent it an air of specialness.

As I got older I realized that most kids with Nintendos had more games and I felt left out for never having played Zelda or Metroid. But man, Micro Machines, Super Mario Bros 3 and Faxanadu was all I needed.

Faxanadu was amazing!

It was such a great game - very simple to just sit down and play, and lots of fun. Sure, there were no powerups, vehicle customizations, no track designer, but it had amazing track/level design. Who as a kid didn't race their boats in the bathtub, cars in the kitchen...

https://archive.ph/2024.10.18-165150/https://readonlymemory....

strong nostalgia led me here. Loved this game so much. Thanks for posting an alt link, the source was not available for me.

Didn't realise there was a more primitive NES version but I really enjoyed playing these on the Mega Drive and PS1. As a young kid I was not thinking about the people behind the games at all, so all such development/business trials and tribulations are news to me!

On the other side of the coin, I had the GB version and remember renting the NEA version.

I think I might have been aware of the Genesis version, but I had no idea it was available on all the other platforms.

I spent hours playing these with my brother. It was always a race to choose Spider, the coolest character.

What's really weird is that the game "Willy Beamish" has a similar character who also happens to be named "Spider". Both Micro Machines and Willy Beamish released in 1991.

This website get the HN hug of death? Can not load from mobile or desktop browser for last few hours...

Replying to my post, can currently load the site.

My friends and I had great fun with Micro Machines 2 on the Mega drive (Genesis).

The cartridge itself was fascinating because it had two extra controller ports on it! You had for player gaming by plugging two controllers into the console and two controllers into the cartridge that was protruding from the top of the console. The cartridge was a little taller than usual to accommodate the extra hardware.

J-Cart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J-Cart

Nice hardware piece, some games even supported controller sharing to have 8 players on one console.

Probably 20 years ago now, I had a Java port of the game on my Motorola v400 (I think?).

The game worked pretty well on a flip phone.

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