maxim-zhao / micromachineseditor

Editor for Master System Micro Machines

Micro Machines Editor

Editor for the Master System version of Micro Machines, based on disassembly of the original Z80 code, implemented in C#.

Status

The editor itself is on hold. I got bored with it. Feel free to continue it!

I have instead been working on a disassembly of the game, under the Analysis section.

What is done/remains to be done

• Decompressor for the (presumably) bespoke compression scheme
• Locating data for, and rendering images of, tiles
• Locating data for, and rendering images of, metatiles and associated metadata (e.g. walls, material types)
• Locating data for, and rendering images of, tracks and associated metadata
• Deal with the game auto-patching layouts - probably better to apply those patches to the data and then remove them, but that's tricky to do from a bare ROM
• UI for selecting metatiles and editing a track in memory, with a few options for rendering metadata over the graphics
• Figuring out some of the game data bits which are still mysterious to me
• Discovery of anything I've missed for the game to work (e.g. CPU AI, how pool table holes work)
• Data compression. I always find compressors hard to do because it rapidly gets hard to do something optimal when the number of possibilities goes up. I suspect a dumb compressor can match the original.
• Maybe swap out compression for an existing one like aPLib?
• Data (re-)insertion into the ROM, possibly with expansion
• Level order editing, for both 1- and 2-player modes
• Level metadata editing (car parameters, names)
• Metatile editing
• Tile editing
• Upgrading from 3bpp to 4bpp graphics (as an enhancement to the game)
• Hacking all the known cheats to check for any more

Not all of this is necessary for a first release - just being able to edit tracks in-place would be the majority of the usefulness.

The disassembly

This is a work in progress, based on an Emulicious disassembly and an awful lot of manual work on top. The editor has been slightly abused to act as a tool for exploring and exporting data from the game.

micromachineseditor's Issues

What file am I supposed to pass in the command line?

Hello,

Sorry to ping you for an old project, but I'm trying to use the editor to visualize the hidden boundaries and such that are in the game. I have some C# experience but I have very little experience working with roms. I've tried passing in a rom as the argument, as well as files from the Analysis folder. Can you help me?

-Jason