Mickey Mania - Timeless Adventures of Mickey Mouse
on SEGA MegaDrive / Genesis

An amazing masterpiece back from ye olden 1994!
Jon Burton's design and programming, Andy Ingram's unique style of artwork and Matt Furniss incredible music - absolutely magical combination.

Since I didn't see anything of the level layout extraction done anywhere on the net - here, I did it for you!

I don't realy have any time editing articles anywhere else, barely any sometimes to do them here, so if you happen to be proficient in editing TCRF or HiddenPalace articles, feel free to skim whatever is useful from here to put there.

Differences in beta version

Since I'm only looking at level artwork assets here, beta-to-final changes here are only related to those.

In Ghost House 1, sofa and lamp got swapped around for some (probably better layout) reason:

→

Level "On the Table" was initially designed shorter:

"On the Table" level originally (in beta) had no ending part with the bottle.  ↓

Since tiles are shared between level and background assets, adding that bottle later added some garbage in the background of the final version. However, since that background garbage is below the screen area, it is not normally visible. See for yourself: On the Table (final) versus On the Table (beta).

Mickey Mania 2

Sadly, instead of Mickey Mania 2 there was Toy Story.
While a technical marvel, I'm not particularly fond of source material: primarily characters and setting, as wel as absolutely bland cookiecutter "story". Mickey Mania 2, given the Burton's amazingly inventive programming, Ingram's masterful art and Furniss' splendid musical score, would have definitely been another true masterpiece of this crew.
Currently we only have a video with what could have been - preview of a pretty much done level artwork assets for wild west level based on "Two Gun Mickey" cartoon from 1934. I could only imagine, how good would it look and sound when finished, with Matt Furniss'es rendition of the tunes and all the goodies.

There's some amazing level design with full level and background artwork done, along with new mechanics and beautiful live transition into night.

If I'd ever get my paws on the very few necessary compressed resource files (tiles, macrotiles, level layout) for this level and day&night palettes, we'd have the amazing level artwork to enjoy here right away.

Level artwork assets

Here's the files - rendered out as they are in the cartridge data: decompressed, level maps into macrotile mappings into tiles into rendered image.
PNGs are 256 color (with up to 64 used, but actually only 16 colors are used for the most part: separate 16 for level and 16 for fore/background) with the proper palettes, but not adjusted into visually~measured exact colors as the VDP outputs. Priority bit is not yet used here, but I'll probably incorporate it as separate renderouts with only priority graphics (useful for spotting what is there and also toy around making functional mockups of the levels by layering the priority image over the normal one) or assign palette entries 64..127 for the priority graphics (so that visually images are the same, but retain the possibility of treating priority graphics separately).

There are some with alternate palettes:
‣ Underground seems to have been initially designed with the Garden palette, and then made looking colder and more raw.
‣ Library light switch loads a normal palette in place of all black entries loaded initially; respective segment of level artwork uses that separate palette.
‣ Final Boss part clearly was designed using juicier Library palette, and then made colder. So added here a version using the library palette.
‣ Three of the Lab levels have their transparent palette entries grey instead of black, so I made additional versions with the entry 00 black as well.
‣ Since Concert (Bonus) level still uses the proper level design fileset, I included it down there as is. Actually it should be treated as just a foreground effect.
‣ All level renders are full size, exactly as they are in cart. You can trim those to your heart's content if you want only the used spots.
‣ And of course, all of these level layouts are free of any sprite-objects or live animated stuff (like water or acid bubbles), so we can see everything just the way as it is.

Enjoy!
 

	Level design assets Dungeon 1 Dungeon 2 Garden Garden Steps Ghost House 1 Ghost House 2 Ghost House 3 (final) Ghost House 3 (beta) Kitchen Lab Acid Pits (as-is) Lab Acid Pits (altered so that palette entry 00 is black) Lab Fire Pits (as-is) Lab Fire Pits (altered so that palette entry 00 is black) Lab Gourney Ride (as-is) Lab Gourney Ride (altered so that palette entry 00 is black) Lab Lift Lab Mad Doc Lab Outside Library (lights on) Library (lights off) Library Boss (Final Boss) (normal palette) Library Boss (Final Boss) (using Library palette) Moose Hunt Steam Boat (b&w) Steam Boat (here if we try to use Wharf color palette, we can see it was actually designed purely b&w, contrary to Wharf level) On the Table (final) On the Table (beta) Underground (normal palette) Underground (using Garden palette) Wharf (color palette) Wharf (monochrome black&white palette) Bonus "Concert" (not realy a level map, just the whirlwind effect)
	Level background and foreground assets Bonus "Concert" Dungeon Garden Garden Steps (outside)  Garden Steps (inside) Ghost House 1 Ghost House 2 (foreground spotlight) Ghost House 2 (altered palette so you can see it) Ghost House 3 (foreground water) Ghost House 3 (foreground moving floor) Lab Background (Acid and Fire Pits, Gourney Ride) Lab Lift (vertical column scrolling) Lab Mad Doc (stars) Lab Outside (clouds) Library (snow) Library (wall) Library Boss (Final Boss) (same snow but slightly different color) Moose Hunt Steam Boat (normal b&w) Steam Boat (using Wharf color palette) On the Table (final) On the Table (beta) Underground (normal palette) Underground (using Garden palette) Wharf (color palette) Wharf (monochrome black&white palette)
	Other related stuff Ghost House "3D" wall (used alongside Ghose House 1 level assets) Ghost House "3D" wall deperspective/unprojected, interpolated (half-assed edit so we can stand in front of that wall, just for giggles) Same but non-interpolated Credits roll (will be here as a pic with size&color markup described, for now here's just a zip with decompressed bin)