About This File
Manic Miner - The Big Bonus Edition
This is a very simple modification of Manic Miner to provide a higher score compared to a standard version. In addition to this, a few small minor (miner?) changes were also made to improve the game a fraction. Care was taken in what changes were made to avoid an insane score value being obtainable.
The 'score changes' performed were as follows:
1. Item Collection: Changed to 1,000 points per item from its default of 100.
2. Air Bonus: Changed to 10 from its default of 1 per air unit remaining upon cavern completion.
3. Kong Bonus: Changed to 1,000 from its default of 100 per block the Kong Beast falls.
4. Extra life: Changed to award an extra life at 100,000 points instead of its default of 10,000 points. This was necessary to prevent an excess of extra lives being awarded!
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Update December 2019 by Ian Rushforth
A Cheat Mode has been added, which is activated by the BASIC loader if the player presses '$' during loading. i.e. the 'SYMBOL SHIFT' and '4' keys simultaneously. The game then enters 'Mega Bonus' mode, allowing the player to accrue even higher scores than in the 'standard' Big Bonus Edition! (Each of the four 'score changes' listed in bullet points 1-4 above are scaled up by an extra factor of 10.)
The 'High Score/Score' row, which is printed at the bottom of the screen during play, is rearranged for the Mega Bonus Edition to allow for higher scores to be accommodated - it is now quite possible to reach a score of a million points!
A 'bug/flaw/imperfection' in the original 'Manic Miner' has been addressed - it used to be the case that if you exceeded the previous High Score during a game, then the High Score was updated 'behind the scenes' at the beginning of execution of the 'Game Over' routine, but the new High Score could not be viewed on the screen until the next game had begun. In this version, once you attain a new High Score during a game, then as soon as that game ends the new High Score is printed onto the 'Game Over' screen just as the 'Boot of Doom' begins to descend!
Finally, a couple of visual glitches from the original game were fixed. More technical details can be found in the 'Readme' .txt file which accompanies the game.
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