Spider

The final elusive " missing posts " in the " Jet Set Jason: In Roddënwald " topic were finally restored properly and into the correct places within the topic. Some small loss of formatting has naturally occurred however the content is there! 🙂 For reference the posts in question: One post here by Korzy_iz_Adb from 9th March One post here by IRF from 24th March Two post's here and here by IRF from 26th March

Its not just you. You need to 'move' when the jump is in progress. Its vaguely similar to how the move vs jump is different in JSW1 vs JSW2 in the Spectrum version. The AMS versions of both variants of these behave in the same way (JSW2 style) and its easy to 'fall off a platform' in JSW2 compared to JSW1, this is relevant as I think its a similar thing. The collision detection though in the new game presented here is lots better all-in-all than the original imo in that its not over-sensitive. (C64 version iirc if you enter the 8x8x grid of a fire cell you lose a life even if there's no pixel contact!) It does seem a bit tight however I could not see a sane suggestion to fix, if you move the bush fire cell to the left you'll have issues getting to the floor and to the right would make it difficult too. It may have to be considered a quirk. I'm attaching two short videos, approx 30secs and another of just over a 1 minute of me doing this both with failure and success. Both video's are around 1mb in size. Please note that the screen colours are very corrupted unfortunately due to attempting to use load/save state files during video recording as well as the fact the emulator puts the sound out of sync, combine that with my erm hamfisted attempt at conversion of an .avi to an mp4 too. However there is just about enough to see. There is one unexpected bonus with the gaming timing however! 🙂 I've not looked if ite Eugene's start position or something else but that seems most likely, on the ZX version at least its not possible iirc to once you've got top rightmost item to immediately go to the conveyor as you'll catch Eugene, with this version if you move immediately you can just about do it. You can do it on other platforms if you don't bother with the item afaik as you then have an extra seconds clearance time. Eugene_Testing.zip May have issues playing the second one, it seems OK in VLC but not in WMP

I completely agree. They may 'fit' screensize wise and even if a few changes are needed to allow for the ZX engine 'quirks' as such, its still a good thing all in all. A couple of years back I did try to get these levels to run properly in an emulator but I needed some immunity cheats for it, simply so I had time to study and take screeenshots (as well as not being forced to play each level) but I could not find anything suitable back then, so it went onto the ever expanding "to return and look at" list. The video's should be enough with screen captures too, to study both the guardian paths etc and the layouts.

As per the other topic with the SAM Coupé version, I do hope this is OK here too. Again, provided for reference purposes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_wS5e0ST_0g Author (YT) hirudov2d Oric Atmos Longplay - Manic Miner.zip Note: Unfortunately, this is the 'corrupted' version of the game that is "out and about" and the guardians and other sprites become badly corrupted from the 17th cavern onwards sadly. But even with that it is still worth a watch of this conversion. The Atmos hardware and capabilities are a little bit different!

Below are two other variants, second and third cavern sets. 🙂 I do hope these are OK to be here like this as they are provided mainly really for 'level design inspiration' , it may be neat to build MM using the layout of one of these perhaps and it is 100 times easier to study an offline vs online video if one requires to step back and forth with it too, and there is always the fact the video may eventually vanish online, sometimes not at the authors request either. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlIxeIbgpdc Author (YT) hirudov2d SAM Coupé Longplay - Manic Miner - The Deeper Caverns.zip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-LmgeQ2jcg Author (YT) hirudov2d SAM Coupé Longplay - Manic Miner - Down, down, deeper and down.zip

I was thinking its amazing how far what was a little idea inspired from a topic on WOS a long time ago now has expanded into such a fun thing. 🙂 🙂

I wanted to show the differences of this vs the original with one combi pic of the first cavern. I do realise more is present however it does visually demonstrate some of the excellent work that went into this: Left : Original 1984 Release Right : Updated 2021 Release Immediate visual changes: Air bar hoziontal to match most other variants. Sane start frame for M.W Sane start position for horizontal guardian Status bar in a suitable colour Playing area expanded horizontally and moved down a little bit the screen to match (afaik) most other variants. Colours changed to match as close as reasonably possible the ZX variant. This is quite interesting as you've managed to use a few more colours than normally possible ie status bar is white.

Thanks Danny. 🙂 Tis difficult I know as its not practical to replay the game in all choices. The 'chaos mode' poke I thought might be worth doing, I may do my own recording of that variant perhaps.

Ah OK. 🙂 I realised I'd made a typo but was a a long long time ago, it was AMOS not ATMOS 🙂 I do have an Oric Atmos actually , sadly no video output of any description, works otherwise! Alway classed that as the "6502 based Speccy" somehow 😮

Most welcome. 🙂 You may wish to edit it to tidy the text formatting a little bit. But the data is there, that's the main thing. Regarding my quote, I've taken a backup and restored it. The results match the test topic. 🙂 Job done!

Project does sound like it has huge potential and I can clearly see from reading your description you've put a lot of careful thought and planning into its inception too. Alas I know no C / C+ / C++ myself. You mention DOS I wonder aside from any issues in writing in x86 assembly ( ! ) if there are any other language choices perhaps... EDIT... I'm not 100% sure I know exactly what I mean myself but although I never tried it "back in the day" , if you have heard of Atmos I think it was for the Amiga a programming tool, I was half thinking a modern variant of that but not one that was too "hand holding" , something that let you deal with the quick bits via a GUI and level design etc and then do the "meat on the bones" so to speak in code directly. 🙂

The following two topics were found to contain truncated posts caused by the charset. I had decided a sane way to look at this further without SQL was to simply view all posts of the member, this is done via their profile and is available to all members anyway. From there I examined each topic that was posted in for any signs of issues, I had to look further than the posts concerned in case any had been quoted etc. I've restored them. To be fair it was two large and two small posts: The post here by myself in "JSW Dark Souls" was restored as the existing copy had no visible content The large post here by jetsetdanny in "Madam Blavskja's Carnival Macabre 48K" was restored as it had been truncated down to a few words! The two other posts are in the latter topic too, although the restoration of those was small as only a few words were missing, ie not really more than one sentence. Here and Here for reference. I'd be surprised to find much if any more 'damage' in posts now though really as not many members tend to use those characters and if its done in the future it won't effect anything. 🙂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3eg6237MUU Author (YT) hirudov2d MM_SC.zip I do have the other two level sets but I've not got around to reducing their file size (without loss of quality) yet. I'm assuming, (perhaps rightly or wrongly) this is OK from a (c) concern because anyone can watch said video and it does not take long for one to either find a downloader utility or trick the browser into downloading it anyway.

I did think about this, however (aside from not having a YT account) the only two emulators I have , one does not offer any audio or video recording and the other always puts them out of sync sadly. See my 'entertainer' post here for what I mean. There is one full video of the original version all the way through (an excellent player) I could do it but I'd have to apply cheats I think as there's no 'rollback' facility built into anything Acorn related I'm aware of.

Top Hat would likely be slightly more palatable than a hard hat! 😛 😮

For all those that have participated in this and the 'test' topic too, either pointing things out or pushing me in the right direction:

Further digging (thanks @IRF for pointing something out) revealed further confirmation of my thoughts: Old unconverted data example: New converted data example (what was here after the convertor did its erm 'magic) Can be plainly and clearly seen its "given up" as soon as it hit the " ë " character. On a better note again, new data here now 🙂 For reference, that post in question is this one

Yes would be interesting to see. The JSW 'engine' on that platform does not seem to suffer from the original flickering effect that upset MM and they do play quite well (imo) as standard, however there's usually room for adjustment and improvement. There's a few quirks copied over too , for instance Swimming Pool item is auto collected (at least in JSW1 , can't remember if it happens in full JSW2) for the only reason the ZX one is.

Yes, it seems that once the converter found something "it did not like too much" it simply truncated that post down, which it should not of done. It should of really just offered an option to carry on, stop or at least logged its actions. I can tell you it did not complain of -any- errors! To be fair the code is well written so quite how it managed to fall through I'm not completely sure. I agree I do not think this is as widespread as initially thought, its only likely to effect special characters, and then not all of them either. No-one was to know. Not your fault! 🙂 I'd agree with this, because the 'damage' as such was caused by the conversion tool, which was ran a long time ago. It should not of been knocked unconscious and truncated data when it seemed "did not know what to do" , its not something I can file as a bug now anyway given the previous version would not be supported. I found further evidence of this on Wikipieda too: I cannot (as best as I can) foresee any issues moving forwards as the table is fully UTF8MB4 ( see here ) so there should be sufficient "space" for most sane character encoding schemes. I do appreciate the concern however. To this end to eliminate worries, I've created a temporary topic in the 'testing forum' , please feel free to quote and copy/paste/type in non-standard characters, although I'd rather the topic does not span more than one page. In a few days I'll attempt to restore this on my own local server and provide a screenshot of its outcome.

Thoughts of making the JSW title screen contain two stacked 'triangles' spring to mind for a moment, then I could not deal with thinking about it! 😄

I thought about it. As best as I can tell (and I hate mysql charset concerns) , the issue was caused by mix encoding, that being that although most of the database was iirc ISO8859 , the checks appeared to fail during the conversion to UTF8MB4 as the tables themselves may of already "been there" , best way I can describe it sorry. Single (old) vs double(new) byte encoding per character in effect There's a few items about this kind of thing via Google, although the most relevant one seemed to be about a WordPress blog conversion, the user had a similar issue. The good news (as good as it can be) I would strongly suspect on this site that it is only going to effect posts that used what I'd call "non standard characters" so the actual 'missing content' is hopefully highly limited as not many members here use these. There are safety checks in the conversion routine however it seemed for reasons unknown to fail them. I can't post the code itself as its © , however I can post the comments in the relevant section that failed. Its quite likely this was updated in the core product some short time afterwards: I'd speculate here "nail/head" 🙂 The other good news really is as I'd performed the conversion well before the site's erm 'holiday' and then its restoration and upgrade on the newer host, there's no doubt as to when the problem happened. By this I mean there's no real question (as I can see it) of if it was an upgrade issue or a host issue or a conversion issue. It has to be the latter. Had I left the conversion until the upgrade it would of ran then anyway, potentially causing difficulty in (as we later found) discovering the likely root cause. So, summary all being well the damage -should- be relatively localised to said characters. 🙂

Absolutely zero harm @Richard Hallas , I'd rather hear something twice than not at all as someone thought it had been already said etc. 🙂 As above, with his permission we now host a copy of this excellent work, with a screenshot selection I made to go along with it and split read_me / tech_info details.

No problem. Yes it was very much well worth the time to do it, I've since found a slightly easier method of this now I've had chance to look into it in more detail too.

Good / Neutral / Bad etc: https://jswmm.co.uk/topic/532-jet-set-jason-in-rodd/?do=findComment&comment=13393 🙂

Topic (manually) recovered. Details of restored data. Good: I was able to restore six valuable posts. Neutral: They lost part of their formatting, this can be put right easily enough with simple edits Bad: There's no more data for this topic to restore, this -is it- as such. However I suspect what was removed or lost we can manage without. 🙂 jetsetdanny's post here is now fully populated jetsetdanny's post here was also restored, this was a very large post compared to what we had present korzy_iz_adb's post here restored, again this was a large post of useful content too jetsetdanny's post here restored, this also a large useful content post korzy_iz_adb's post here restored IRF's post here restored 🙂