Spider

Some hardware pics taken yesterday. I'll replace this line of text with a link or two later today or tomorrow. +2A ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- +3 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 48K Plus / Microdrive / Kempston

Mainly for @crembut I've provided the results into that test topic now, I thought it best to show rather than just post/say as such.

Thanks Richard. 🙂 I'll attempt a proper reply later bit time limited as I write this now. I strongly suspect on a real Electron it would look very similar as iirc the top area is needed for the trickery, as it runs really fast for that screen mode, given the Elk's constraints being (iirc) half BBC speed in some cases. I have nothing negative to say about it really, if I had to be picky I would say a single line space at the bottom of the screen would look neat but it may not be possible or practical. I note there's the emulator and real machine versions but not sure yet what the difference is unless its a timing issue perhaps. Downloaded that emulator for a closer look over the weekend.

Thanks. Yes I did wonder about that but I'll emphasise the 'development' nature of the pic in the post itself. I've just edited my post above to reflect this a bit more. 🙂 I think once (hopefully) the game is here with its screenshots etc it will be OK. I saw the posts on stardot a few days ago then the link to Twitter where I found the vid/screenshot. 🙂 To slightly compensate here's the real first cavern. Its a very good result for the erm 'crimped' nature of the Electron. The speed is excellent too given this machines constraints over the regular 'B I did take that with ElecrEm as I don't appear to have Elkulator to hand at the moment! Only issue with the former emulator aside from no built in screenshot capability unless its a hidden keypress is I cannot work out what del/copy are mapped to, not that it matters I'll get Elkulator later or tomorrow. The cavern cheat option is a very sane and sensible idea, you can now 'train' yourself for each cavern as many times as you like. Its sometimes a simple idea like this (ie: do not increment cavern ID upon completion if cheat was used to select this cavern) is a brilliant idea. 🙂 Small < 3mb video of some gameplay by the author 0xC0DE, runtime 1m42s. I do hope its OK to have this small video here for reference purposes. Will remove upon request. May wish to lower volume level a little bit first:

I've split the 'truncated posts' that followed on from my post above into their own topic for convenience. 🙂 Said topic can be found here, still in the News/Feedback section obviously. As the issue this topic from 2017 was originally opened for has long been resolved, I'll go ahead and close it. If any more truncated posts are noted (I hope not!) then: Please feel free to post into the existing open topic for them or start a new one for other questions / issues / feedback.

Perhaps (after a bit of thought) as you say dialect it could be similar to how say a "not great" translation of a technical manual (old VCR manuals spring to mind here!) appeared. Tis a 6502 based 'nearest to Speccy' machine though I think!

Thanks @Richard Hallas , I was 'aware' of this and seen some progress but had not had chance to follow it. Here is an old "in development" screenshot of it. Please note as I say this is not how the finished product looks! 'Dev' screenshot posted for reference purposes (and for the curious) Please see my next post for a screenshot of the Central Cavern how it is now. I'll contact the author later today or this week to see if we are able to host it here too, possibly I can do similar to how I did TobyLobster's variant, in that I'll put the files into a zip, put documentation into a text file, take some screenshots etc and write up a description etc ie "the legwork" 🙂

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.