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.
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)
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.
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...
> '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.
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!
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.
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.
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)
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.
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...
Faxanadu was amazing!
A story about reverse engineering the Micro Machines v3 format to create an editor… http://bradders.org/MMs/
(not my work)
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.
> '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.
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!
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.
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.