Micro Machines Asset Arena Format
| Format type | Image |
|---|---|
| Hardware | VGA |
| Colour depth | 8-bit (VGA) |
| Minimum size (pixels) | 8×8 |
| Maximum size (pixels) | 248×96 |
| Palette | External |
| Plane count | 1 |
| Transparent pixels? | Yes |
| Hitmap pixels? | No |
| Games |
The graphics for the menus and front-end screens of Micro Machines are stored in COMPRESS.PI0 to COMPRESS.PI6. The palette is INTRO.PAL (VGA Palette).
File format
Each file is compressed with Micro Machines Compression. PI0-PI5 decompress to 0xC000 bytes each, PI6 to 0xA000. Joined together they form one 335,872-byte (0x52000) block of memory, a memory dump that the developers cut into 48 kB pieces.
The block contains 18 images, originally separate .CHR files. There is no directory in the files: the names, sizes and offsets are stored in a table inside the game's executable. Each image is a number of frames, stored one after another, each frame row by row with one byte per pixel. Colour 0 is transparent.
| Name | Offset | Size | Frames | Content |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FCHAPPY.CHR | 0x00000 | 48×48 | 22 | The 11 characters' faces, happy (2 frames each) |
| FCSAD.CHR | 0x0C600 | 48×48 | 22 | Faces, sad |
| FCFROWN.CHR | 0x18C00 | 48×48 | 11 | Faces, frowning |
| FCNORMAL.CHR | 0x1EF00 | 48×48 | 14 | Faces, neutral |
| THUMB.CHR | 0x26D00 | 48×32 | 3 | Fist, pointing hand, thumbs up (menu cursor) |
| MINATURE.CHR | 0x27F00 | 32×16 | 38 | Vehicle miniatures in 4 colour sets |
| BADGE.CHR | 0x2CB00 | 72×32 | 1 | Winged badge |
| CASE.CHR | 0x2D400 | 8×8 | 100 | Tiles of the vehicle display case |
| CASE.MAP | 0x2ED00 | 674 bytes | - | Tile map of the display case, see below |
| CUP.CHR | 0x2EFB0 | 96×8 | 10 | The trophy, in 10 horizontal strips (96×80 when stacked) |
| INTRO.CHR | 0x30D70 | 96×64 | 9 | One picture per vehicle class, for the title screen |
| WORDS.CHR | 0x3E570 | 96×16 | 3 | "MicroMachines", "Head to Head", "Challenge" |
| SELGAM.CHR | 0x3F770 | 96×64 | 6 | Game selection panels |
| LOGO.CHR | 0x48780 | 248×96 | 1 | Micro Machines logo |
| NOS.CHR | 0x4E480 | 24×32 | 4 | Numbers 1-4 |
| FONT1.CHR | 0x4F080 | 8×8 | 38 | Small font: 0-9, A-Z, !, ? |
| FONT2.CHR | 0x4FA00 | 8×16 | 38 | Tall font, same characters |
| FRAME.CHR | 0x51630 | 8×8 | 4 | Frame corners |
Display case map
CASE.MAP is the tournament board: a byte giving the number of columns (32), a byte giving the number of rows (21), then 32×21 bytes of tile numbers into CASE.CHR, row by row. Drawn, it is a 256×168 image.
Notes
The race loads its own graphics into the same memory, so the game reloads all seven files after every race.
Credits
This file format was reverse engineered by VorticonCmdr. If you find this information helpful in a project you're working on, please give credit where credit is due. (A link back to this wiki would be nice too!)