Micro Machines Special Edition... again!

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Devin
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Micro Machines Special Edition... again!

Post by Devin » Sat May 29, 2010 7:08 pm

Just wanted to highlight the article Bas posted here on Interactive Dreams.

I've been conducting a little research with much help from Ashley Hogg, the CD-i version developer. Just to clarify a few points, the special edition as the only version released on CD-i featured more levels than the other platforms including Megadrive, SNES and so on. This is why it is called a 'Special Edition'. Furthermore the prototype v1.02 does fit with some documentation I've been reading. Specifically a 'Final Bug Report' for Micro Machines version 1.02 dated 22/08/95 which fits with the production date of 11/08/95 for the testing beta itself.

However I wouldn't go so far as to say it has more 'features' than the released product. It is simply an unfinished game and so any features would include game play errors, hot spot problems and system crashes! Having said that it is interesting to find an early production manual included. Which in itself went through many iterations, but this example does appear to be a near final release of the manual. Nice find!

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Post by Bas » Sat May 29, 2010 9:03 pm

Nice! I've never played other versions so I still wonder what's more and new in it compared to the other versions. The CD-i version was a port of the NES version, right?

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Post by Devin » Sat May 29, 2010 9:31 pm

NES version rings a bell but it is not described in the files I have here.

Lots of notes from the beta testers themselves giving Ash lots of hard work trying to squash the bugs! You get a sense of it coming down to the wire with a fatal flaw discovered in a near final version with the potential to scuttle the scheduled release date. From an outsiders view that's nothing new when it comes to games however! Even the newest game falls foul of bugs in the here and now. It's interesting to read these memos and notes all the same.

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Post by Bas » Sun May 30, 2010 7:13 am

Here's a quote from the interview available on Black Moon:
" Initially I had hoped it would be fairly simple from a code perspective, since CD-i had a 68000 series CPU and the Megadrive game had already been coded in 68000 assembler. Unfortunately, due to some rights problem (I still don't really know why) we couldn't use that code. So I had the original NES 6502 assembler code handed over, and I made a printout of the whole thing. I made a rough map of the code functionality (for example higher level processes and lower level detail) and decided on a rough plan of attack. During the development I basically took each part of the code in turn and re-coded it into 68000 directly from the 6502 reference."

These notes make releases so much more interesting :)


While reading through that interview again I see this: "Micro Machines is obviously the type of game that's more fun against a friend (or several), so Codemasters really wanted to incorporate multiplayer in the CD-i version. We were primarily thinking of the then-new CDi-450 unit. One console-esque controller was what the unit came with, so I think it was David Darling who suggested just letting the cars auto-accelerate and share the 2 sides of the gamepad to control just the steering.

The J-Cart was a superb idea in my opinion, and was only made possible by the fact that Codemasters had successfully won a court battle from Sega and continued manufacturing their own cartridges. Technologically I don't think it was very difficult to implement - but everyone else was buying their carts from Sega and you weren't going to get any such feature from them. "


Image


That sounds like a reason for a special edition too!

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Post by Devin » Sun May 30, 2010 3:40 pm

I believe SNES also had this 2-player scheme. At least I noticed a similar design implemented on the box art indicating 2 hands on one joypad!

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