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