"Manic Miner 5: Los peligros del LSD" - tape version

"Manic Miner 5: Los peligros del LSD" is a 1998 game by Ignacio Pérez Gil. It was created using Richard Swann's "Manic Miner Editor" and some other tools.

The game was released in April 1998. It is hosted on World of Spectrum, Spectrum Computing and other sites. Its page on JSW Central is here.

The game was only released as a Z80 snapshot (a dump of the ZX Spectrum's memory). It has never been released in tape format. However, tape format seems to be the most elegant, complete and definitive way of releasing Spectrum games, reflecting what happened on the original hardware, providing data which you load into the machine's memory 'from zero', rather than having an image of the contents of the ZX Spectrum memory at a particular instance in time.

For this reason, I created a tape version of "Manic Miner 5: Los peligros del LSD" in TAP and TZX format, converted from Ignacio Pérez Gil's original Z80 snapshot.

Ignacio used an interesting technical solution to introduce Spanish diacritical marks in room names and in the text of the scrolling message. He used the Printer Buffer at #5B00 - #5BFF to add the pertinent code and data. In his Z80 snapshot, the code which allows the use of diacritics resides at #5BF2 - #5BFF, and the data at #5B00 - #5B2F.

In order to create a standard "Manic Miner" TAP/TZX file that does not include any data to be loaded into the contended memory (i.e. which loads a block of code starting at #8000), Ignacio's code was moved to the #9B00 - #9BFF range, unused in the original "Manic Miner" (occupied by source code remnants). The code was placed at #9BF2 - #9BFF (and modified as necessary) while the pixel patterns for accented letters are now stored at #9B00 - #9B2F. The rest of the source code remnants were untouched and no other changes were made to the game, apart from the CALL instruction at #92BD - #92BF, which Ignacio himself had modified to point to the additional code in the Printer Buffer and which has now been modified to point to the new location of this code.

A simple BASIC loader was created for the game. Ignacio's original loading screen was used for the loading process. It was compressed to a little over half of its original size in order to speed up the loading of the game, in case someone does not use any acceleration method on an emulator or wants to load the game into a real ZX Spectrum.

As a result, the player is offered a version of Ignacio Pérez Gil's game which loads from tape and plays exactly as the original. The original Z80 snapshot and Readme are included in the ZIP package available for download for completeness.

Andrew Broad's SPECSAISIE 1.3 Beta 5 (the latest publicly available version is v. 1.2), Claus Jahn's ZX-Blockeditor v. 2.4.3 (a newer version 2.4.3.1 is available), John Elliott's JSWED v. 2.3.7 and Andy Ford's Screen Compressor were used to prepare the tape version of "Manic Miner 5: Los peligros del LSD". Richard Dymond (SkoolKid)'s complete MM disassembly (available in hexadecimal and in decimal) was also very helpful in this endeavour, as were Andrew Broad's Technical Notes on his game "Jet Set Willy: The Lord of the Rings".