ceptimus

I was interested (and alarmed) to read that UK phone number assignments are managed via a Yahoo group. See https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0027/56646/simwood.pdf On another forum I frequent, user lisarea commented, "I'm sure the official database is safe and secure on an AS/400 somewhere, remotely accessible via some 30 year old homegrown gateway."

No, I get the impression that hardly anyone has played it. :( If you do try it, download the latest one from the link above as I've fixed a couple of minor bugs. I was going to attempt a JSW conversion too - my plan was to do a gentle horizontal screen scroll one pixel at a time to accommodate the 256-pixel wide screen on the Maximite's 240-pixel width display. The scroll would occur gradually depending on Willy's horizontal screen position: so when Willy was in the left quarter of the screen 16 pixels would be cropped from the right edge; when he's at the centre, 8 pixels pixels would be cropped from both edges and so on. I've put that project on the back burner for now though. I think most of Maximite/Minimite community are not really interested in games. As far as I know, the main place they hang out is on The Back Shed forum in the Microcontrollers and PC projects section.

I've ported the original Bug-Byte Spectrum version of Manic Miner to the Colour Maximite. The Maximite only runs BASIC (its own version called MMBASIC) - there's no way to call machine code routines from Maximite Basic. But it does run it very fast, so I was able to get the speed to match the original Spectrum; actually it could run a lot faster. Most obvious differences are: The Maximite game screen (mode 4) is only 240 pixels wide (by 216 pixels high) so I had to trim 8 pixels from both vertical edges of the Spectrum screen to make it fit. Luckily, all the caverns have 8-pixel impenetrable walls up both sides, so the game play is unaltered - you can't see those walls but the edges of the screen act as walls. The Maximite only has 8 colours compared to the Spectrum's 15. Doesn't make much difference to the gameplay except to make the distinction between crumbling floors and normal floors less obvious in some caverns. I've made a video of me playing the first few caverns. I'm not very good at playing!. https://youtu.be/LcbuvVZmD_g You can download the game (and because it's in BASIC, also the source!) from http://ceptimus.co.uk/MMINER.zip

Thanks. I also realize now that I was wrong about the black note key mapping. I was looking at Jim Bagley's code in his conversion of MM to the Parallax Propeller - which does attempt to map the black key positions (though wrongly). The original Spectrum code only ever maps notes to the white keys. Thanks for telling me that the played notes are different to the highlighted ones - I would probably have wasted hours trying to figure out why they were wrong. Do you have any good references for what tones and durations the numbers in the tune table actually produce?

I guess this has been discussed before, but I couldn't find it. I just noticed this as I'm currently coding a conversion of MM to the Colour Maximite. On the Spectrum version, the piano keyboard on the title screen is wrong - the groups of black notes should alternate in twos and threes, but they don't - there are two adjacent groups of two black notes under the word 'ENTER'. I don't know if this error is also present in the Commodore 64 or other versions. The code that highlights which notes are being played in Red and Cyan DOES have the locations of the black notes in the correct 2-3-2-3 sequence though - so all the black note locations on the right two-thirds of the screen are wrong. The code works by flipping the attribute squares that contain the notes - but because the black notes straddle two attribute squares this wouldn't work properly for the black notes anyway. As far as I can see, the black notes aren't used in the title tune. I guess Matthew Smith was aware of the bug and just altered the music to avoid the black notes! Maybe that is part of the reason why the music is so annoyingly screechy!