[HN Gopher] The Making of Micro Machines
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The Making of Micro Machines
Author : Tomte
Score : 51 points
Date : 2024-10-15 16:57 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (readonlymemory.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (readonlymemory.com)
| ElCapitanMarkla wrote:
| I spent hours playing these with my brother. It was always a race
| to choose Spider, the coolest character.
| Dwedit wrote:
| 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.
| AnthonBerg wrote:
| https://archive.ph/2024.10.18-165150/https://readonlymemory....
| kalbadia wrote:
| strong nostalgia led me here. Loved this game so much. Thanks
| for posting an alt link, the source was not available for me.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| 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.
| Dwedit wrote:
| 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)
| markx2 wrote:
| 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.
| WorkerBee28474 wrote:
| > 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.
| Xenoamorphous wrote:
| 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.
| IggleSniggle wrote:
| Castle of Illusion was great though
| Dwedit wrote:
| > _' 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.
| frou_dh wrote:
| 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!
| lastofthemojito wrote:
| 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.
| cmiller1 wrote:
| Faxanadu was amazing!
| bluedino wrote:
| 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...
| turbonaut wrote:
| A story about reverse engineering the Micro Machines v3 format to
| create an editor... http://bradders.org/MMs/
|
| (not my work)
| rtb wrote:
| 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
| joemi wrote:
| 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!
| markx2 wrote:
| https://www.analogue.co/3d
| tonetegeatinst wrote:
| This website get the HN hug of death? Can not load from mobile or
| desktop browser for last few hours...
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(page generated 2024-10-18 23:00 UTC)