Prime Watch 3

Live memory inspection and 3D world viewer for Metroid Prime 1 GCN, working from memory dumps or connected live to Dolphin. Works on Windows; Linux and MacOS require a custom build of Dolphin.

What it does

Connecting

• It should automatically detect and attach to a running Dolphin. If you are running multiple instances, you will need to manually select which Dolphin to attach to.
• Load a memory dump (mem1.raw MEM1 image) to inspect a game state offline.

3D world view

• The room's collision geometry rebuilt from memory, with backface/frontface culling options
• Actors drawn in place — enemies/AI, projectiles, pickups, physics actors, and generic actors, each toggleable.
• Triggers visualized as boxes, filterable by what they detect
• Area status overlay: which rooms are loaded, their load chain/phase, occlusion state, and the current resource-streaming queue.
• Adjustable scene lighting and player ground shadow.

Cameras

• Follow Player — orbit the player with the mouse.
• Game Cam — see through the actual in-game camera.
• Detached — free-fly camera with WASDQE + mouse look (hold shift to move faster).

Drag on the view to look/orbit, scroll to zoom (or dolly in Detached mode), middle-drag to pan in Detached mode.

Player ghosts

Record up to five position "ghosts" of the player and leave them in the world for comparison. shift+1..5 records a ghost, ctrl+1..5 clears it.

Object inspector

• globals window: some of the global objects used by the game, browsable for live values
• Objects browser: the full live entity list with a type breakdown and an include/exclude text filter. Hover a row to highlight that object in 3D, or pin a watch window to a specific editor ID and follow it across rooms.
• Raw view: a hex dump of emulated memory.

Analysis tools

• Collision triangle picker — hover the world to read the triangle index, material flags, and vertex positions under the cursor.
• Instant unmorph detection — indicate when the player's position would force an instant unmorph.
• Collision reposition failsafe — predicts whether the player is about to get pushed by the game's anti-clip failsafe, shows the push vector, and can tell you what would happen if you morphed on the spot (clean, nudged, or warped out of bounds through a wall seam).

Scripting

Drop .rhai scripts in the scripts/ folder. They run every frame against live memory and can build their own inspector windows — useful for custom HUDs and readouts. Scripts hot-reload, get glam vector/quaternion/matrix helpers, and can pin their windows to any screen edge or corner. See scripts/ for examples.

Struct definitions

Struct definitions live in prime_defs/ as editable .bs files and can be hot-reloaded without restarting.

Running

Unzip the release and run the primewatch3 binary. Keep the prime_defs/ and scripts/ folders next to it — they're loaded at startup.

Start Dolphin, load Metroid Prime, and Prime Watch will attach on its own.

Version History

1.3.6

• Fix for scripting to support array indexing
• Script (disabled by default) to get morph ball lift force and speed averages

1.3.5

• Objects that share the same collision mesh will now be rendered properly
• Doors will properly hide when they are no longer collidable

1.3.4

• Fix enums (they were broken)
• Add surfaceRestraint to CPlayer

1.3.3

• Perf improvements to platform rendering
• Fix missing Ripper platform (i.e. MQA platform)

1.3.2

• Add physics actor/platform rendering (including doors!)
• Fix bitfield issues

1.3.1

• Improved instant unmorph detection

1.3.0

• Add reposition failsafe detection

1.2.0

• Add instant unmorph detection and collision triangle picker

1.1.0

• Add scripting engine

1.0.0

• Initial release of the Rust rewrite