Talk:Micro Machines (NES)

Starting Line Crash?

In an article on readonlymemory.vg, it was stated that the Micro Machines was manufactured with a bug, that caused the game to crash when the you tried to brake/reverse on the starting line:

Famously, 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.’

The way it's worded leads me to believe, that both American revisions should suffer from this bug, and even the European ROM should still be affected, since it was fixed via additional hardware. However, it's not something I could reproduce on any revision, at least on emulators. Has anyone had better luck? I can only assume that if the bug really exists, someone misremembered the exact conditions for it to occur. ~y (talk) 08:27, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

That story just makes me wonder how the ROMs were dumped. Wouldn't it be possible to get two different ROM images from the same cartridge: one with the "Game-Genie-like" hardware in place patching out that byte, and one from the bare original board without the patch? --Bag of Magic Food (talk) 08:49, 7 July 2021 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I took a look at NESCartDB's photos of the PCBs for Codemasters' games. (You may need to use archive.org depending on when you read this, since that site goes offline a lot.) The only variation I see among the BIC-48 boards is whether a capacitor is attached to C5 or C4; I'm not seeing anything that looks as if it could be filtering the PRG ROM's output in any of their copies of Micro Machines.

It's possible that the bug could have been introduced in the first European version, which means the patch would have only needed to be applied to the Plug-thru lock-on cartridges, the kind Codemasters only released three games on before switching to the smooth black cartridges. Unfortunately, while NESCartDB has documented all of Codemasters' American releases, the only European release they have from them is Cosmic Spacehead. Following the pattern of The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy, there's a good chance that the Plug-thru version of Micro Machines uses the same ROM as the Aladdin compact cartridge, but I guess we won't know for sure until somebody gets a real Plug-thru copy and cracks it open! --Bag of Magic Food (talk) 05:39, 9 August 2021 (UTC)