Jsw 16K

[Spider]

This is quite a remarkable achievement in my opinion, rewriting JSW to fit into a 16K machine. Its written by Jonathan Cauldwell who also wrote Arcade Game and Platform Game designers amongst many other things. :)

 

Naturally there are some limitations in doing this. I noted the following

 

• There is no sound with the exception of a noise on a loss of life.

   

• Sprites are mostly white

   

• The mansion is cut down, in particular there is nothing past the Tool Shed (ie: beach etc), no MegaTree and no 'top level ie 'On The Roof' etc.

   

• There's no 'boot' Game Over screen

   

• There is no ending as such, the game just ends.

   

• Most rooms have less sprites than the original

   

• There are no ropes

   

• There are no conveyors

   

• I counted 37 screens although I may of missed one or two.

Loader:

 

Title:

 

Game Over:

 

Onwards with some in game screenshots:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[jetsetdanny]

This game's page on JSW Central is now as complete as it is meant to be. It contains a screenshot gallery, an embedded video from the JSW Central YouTube channel and an RZX recording showing a more efficient completion of the game than the previous best publicly available recording. I have also added more information about the completion of the game.

"JSW 16K" has 38 edited rooms (in your post above, you've missed "West Wing", Andy). 33 of them need to be visited to complete the game. It is not necessary to visit "Master Bedroom", "East Wall Base", "Halfway up East Wall", "Swimming Pool" and "West Bedroom" (the room names are slightly different from the original "Jet Set Willy" - most of the articles have been dropped from them, to free some space in memory, I imagine).

The  item in "Front Door" has to collected as the last one, because there is no way to return to the playing field after collecting it (there's no way to go past the barrel in "Ballroom East"). So if it is collected earlier, the player will not be able to complete the game.

The game is fun to play. Certainly it proves that 16K is enough to make an enjoyable platformer! 👍

[Spider]

Thanks Danny. 🙂

In my defence here, the topic was created quite a few years ago now! 😮 😄

In my guilt, I should of updated it perhaps but your update IS hugely appreciated simply as just because its an old topic does not mean its not worth updating with your information, thank you for posting here as well as your own site update.

Now then, who wants to try to get MM into 16K ? Even with 18 caverns maybe as you can have one Amoebatron and one Kong cavern...

[jetsetdanny]

On 2/7/2022 at 2:46 PM, Spider said:

In my defence here, the topic was created quite a few years ago now! 😮 😄

 

No need for defence, since there's been no attack 😉 .

MM/JSW is a long-term engagement for me. I revisit some topics many years later (like re-recording some of my RZX walkthroughs recently; the original ones were recorded back in 2006 or so).

It is the beauty of the scene, too. From time to time, there are game authors coming back after many years with brand-new products (like Geoff Eddy did last year). And sometimes they come back to pick up the development of a game that was stopped a few years back.

Which reminds me: we haven't heard from Fabian for a long time. I wonder if will continue his excellent work on "Jason in Roddenwald" any time soon? (spelling the title off the top of my head, perhaps with a typo or two)

[Spider]

Thanks 😄 hehe.

Yes lets hope Fabian does rematerialize at some point.

Oh regarding on jswcentral your comment about this games completion, link

 

Quote

The game does not have a toilet run. It is completed upon the collection of the last item. This last item has to be the one in "Front Door", because there is no way to return to the playing field after collecting it, so if it is collected earlier, the player will not be able to complete the game.

 

I can't say I've noted that myself, I may if I can try that at the weekend as from a cursory glance at the map it looks possible (pixel illusion) but I do not doubt you at all. 🙂

[jetsetdanny]

IIRC the problem is that you can't jump over the barrel on the way back (you always get killed) and there is no other way to get back to the main map either. However, if someone proves this thesis wrong, I will be happy to correct the description on JSW Central 🙂 . 

[Spider]

I see. 🙂

I've just had another go to refresh my memory.

The actual "problem" here is not so much the barrel (although as you say that does lead to Willy's demise) its the fact that Willy always falls into the gap, he does not attempt to 'move left' once he starts to fall, due to (afaik) the game control engine itself which at a guess is likely influenced by PGD and AGD both from the same author.

I did a mockup of a 'quick fix' although implementing it may be a bit more tricky as the room data compression I've not looked at! It seems easier to fix it that way even though it removes much of the barrel jump challenge. Hmm.

 

EDIT... The room data does not seem that difficult to manually edit. The problem will be finding it unless I set a memory write breakpoint for that pixel and keep going until I find the routine. It may be easier to kludge it as the room names are not stored with the room data, they are in a separate piece near the end of the code itself.

A random edit setting a couple of hundred bytes to zero in what looked from a decimal view of "data" did this. Willy was not killed by guardian collision into earth cells (I did not expect him to be)

EDIT2... Its not loadable into PGD (yes I paid!) but I expected that.

If the data is stored in the same order as the room names are and if they are all the same data size and if I can figure it out it may be possible to simply change that block and the one above it back to air. Its a lot of 'IF's" though... 😮

[Spider]

Ballroom East is ID 11 or 12, depending if you start from ID 0 or ID 1 for a room.

The earth cell colouring (or the fact its 'earth' by its colour definitions) has a lot to do with it.

Temporary fix: On that screen POKE 22603 , 000

Vid:

 

If you change it to 71 so that's 22603 , 071 , you can pass back through it as its treated differently but in that case the cell is still visible but its black/white/bright the same value as the air, except Willy cannot pass though it like an air cell. Try both pokes anyway and see what I mean. 🙂

[Spider]

OK fixed. Took a bit of finding. To cut time down I decided to just insert a row of identical bytes, moving 100 bytes at a time and observing the crashes/results to the room via a refreshed snapshot. Once I'd figured out this "quick way" it was not that difficult to locate the data. Its stored with a byte character for a cell, regardless of type, similar to how PGD does it, by this I mean you can use "water cell x" in any room as you merely use its value in that location. I did not spend time looking at room compression.

In the end I decided upon (after trying a few dozen cell types) a choice of two really, one to fix it and one to make it more cosmetically appealing.

Check our "special place" for specifics on this.

See the attached small 40seconds videos below... of "patch level one" and "patch level two" respectively. 🙂

 

[jetsetdanny]

Personally, I think the game doesn't need fixing, as it's perfectly completable and the necessity to collect the item in "Front Door" as the last one is an additional challenge, which is quite cool.

Just my personal opinion 🙂 .

Enforcing a particular item to be the last one to collect is not common in JSW games, which is why I think it has some added value here. Off the top of my head, I can think of only one game that does it. In Andrew Broad's "We Pretty" the item in the room ""TH E CAR ROT OF REF LEC T I O N" (63) has to be collected as the last one. If you don't leave it until the very end, all your hard toil in this otherwise very difficult game will have been in vain...

Interestingly, I thought that this was conscious design on Andrew's part and that the room's name, which I always read as "The Carrot of Reflection", is somehow related (you come to reflect upon your failure when you didn't leave this item as the last one and try to complete the game, and realise it's impossible, or something to this effect). However, Andrew said (on the Yahoo! Group, which is offline these days so I cannot link to it):

"Strangely enough, I had played We Pretty to completion just a few weeks before you, and I too fell for the trap of not leaving the item in "TH E CAR ROT OF REF LEC T I O N" as the last to be collected!

And I had been unaware of this pitfall until playing We Pretty again last year. It's not something I intended when I wrote We Pretty - I guess I must have been too set in my ways whilst playtesting."

When I let him know my thoughts about the room name, he replied:

"An interesting interpretation, but the room-name actually came about in December 1997, when I was reading the following paper:

Tyugu E. and Addibpour M. (1996). Declarative reflection tools for agent shells. Pages 203-215 in: Future Generation Computer Systems 12 (2,3). On the Internet at ftp://it.kth. se/labs/se/ Reports/refl- jfgcs.ps. Z (modified 12th April 1996).

My father asked me what I was reading about; I said 'declarative reflection', but he thought I said 'the carrot of reflection'!"

🙂