Spider

Thanks for this Norman. :) Appreciated. EDIT... I wonder if you'd give thought (perhaps at a future point, not now as such) to placing this into the Downloads please ? I realise there's probably a good reason its here in this topic rather than there in the first place though, either is fine anyway.

I think some of the caverns could possibly get a few more points, I was looking at "Sixteenth Cavern" in particular actually as the 'frozen' image of it shows the item below the Portal uncollected for one, indicating a 'drop into' exit rather than a 'jump up' one. I then thought the extra points for this might be worth it - however given the 'extra time' needed to reach it, (even though its a few seconds) might not be compensated for by the changing air bonus. Maybe! :)

Yes you've landed in the 'right place' :) Welcome!

:) Welcome! From memory it takes you to something like "Now you are in it!" which is a trap due to the floors being conveyors. I seem to recall there were exits on these rooms too but not reachable due to the conveyor effect, if they were merely there for the sake of it or not I could not say. There does not appear to be an easy way to disable conveyor 'action' in this version to manually explore those areas. Thanks Danny! :thumbsup: I remember 'way back' both "The On Licence" and "The Object Shop" hehe.

I'm happy to take a look at this too if you want, although I have suspicions it is not going to be a .z80 snapshot in a form we are used to dealing with. It seems unlikely but it is possible it may not be .z80 at all and is 'translated on the fly' too, ARM assembly code for instance. I have not looked at Android devices to be able to determine this.

I did consider that (at one point for either this or another title) but to do them all manually :) even with a 'Speccy side' tool is a bit of a pain. EDIT... I may be able to write something to automate it, hmm. ** adds to "look into" list **

Ah well, I guess its safe to leave it as is for now. :)

Thanks for having a play with this. Pleased you (sort of) enjoyed it, well I read it that way! :lol: :thumbsup: I could redefine the exits to be logical where practical though, in some cases by default they are not correct, a quick example: By map design 'On top of the house' is sat above 'Priest's Hole'. Now, moving down from 'On top of the House' does fall through to 'Priest's hole' as you would rightly expect. The problem here is although without cheating you cannot normally exit up from 'Priest's Hole' , if you do you end up in 'The Bow' as that is where the up exit is defined to! Must be an oversight as Emergency Generator / Rescue Esmerelda are properly linked vertically.

I'll follow this up in a few days. :) For the moment is there a convenient list somewhere perhaps of JSW games that make use of 'Entrance to Hades' ? By this I mean the player can enter and leave without entering the more usual IDS syndrome. It does not matter if the player is required or not to actually visit said room. I'd be interested primarily in those using the 48K engine or derivates of that, but JSWED 64/128 variants are OK too. Similar with JSW2 please and (the few?) games based on an edited Software Projects JSW2 game. EDIT... Non ZX versions are OK to mention too. Pretty sure either the original JSW or JSW2 for the CBM had an exit or entrance here on the lower left.

:lol:

I think this might be worth a little bit of digging, perhaps consider it something to "look at" this year. I would be very surprised if the original bit of paper/fax did not still exist somewhere or failing that a scanned digital copy of it for archival purposes.

Thanks. I'd expect you are correct in that it was send to their offices and each magazine just published it in a way they felt appropriate (similar to those two examples) , they were actually a couple of months before I got my first Speccy although if memory serves correctly I had played JSW previously on someone else's machine a few weeks before then. I got my ZX in Oct-84 What is slightly odd is I know we (friends) referred to it as a "bad program bug" and the easy way to tell it was going pear-shaped was the fact Chapel was vacant. We did not realise the trigger/cause for a long time. In regard to the S.P notification, it would be very helpful and interesting to see the letter*** they sent to each magazine. Although some publishers (obviously the magazines) are no longer with us or perhaps subject to a take-over or two, given it was probably sent to at a guess half a dozen of them at the time it would seem likely that in some deep dusty dungeon paperwork archive at least one publisher still has a copy of the letter. *** I say letter as I do not think they would telephone this information over, fax is a good option I suppose too but in that case it would be similar to a letter, ie: a bit of paper "somewhere" Perhaps this ought to be considered a missing piece of the puzzle ? :)

Yet more (as usual) helpful hints and advice! :) :)

This text is or very similar is often quoted in various articles regarding the infamous 'Attic Bug' Question here is, I've never seen anything "official" from Software Projects about this, only a couple of listings in Magazines which were from. If as stated in many places... ... Where is or was the official announcement / article / text on this ? The nearest I could find to anything vaguely official were these and I do not recall seeing anything else back in the day either. Your Spectrum - August 1984 Personal Computer Games - July 1984 However, I sort of half expected something from S.P directly perhaps, not necessarily a half page ad :D , but something maybe with their logo or suchlike on it. Perhaps I am over-thinking this. :) Incidentally although I cannot be sure I think this might be the first time a software house released a public patch to an 8bit home computer game too.

Not important but here is a snapshot of the 'fun' I had: flicker_white.z80 I could not reliably save it out as a tap as it either errored out with no memory or crashed if you tried to cheat via starting with 32762 instead. I could work around it but it seems a lot of work for no reason! :lol: Fixed. It had eaten part of the startup code, specifically things after the LD SP , manually adding three pokes to fix to loader: 33797 , 195 33798 , 202 33799 , 135 ; JP 34762 Attached is a .tzx , interesting to of noted (from the .z80 above) the low end of the memory where the game variables live is quite heavily populated, more than I would of expected. Pic loading screen ( sorry! but I'm more sorry for the Basic in the loader itself :blush: check it out! ) and functional-ish tape: flicker_white.tzx Note starting room from this is still Attic, but you'll likely have to writetyper your way out of various scenario's as its got quite bad!

I was not able to duplicate this despite a few attempts. I even tried a few manual pokes to it while the 'destruction' was in progress! :) I did end up with a flickering white guardian though but I suspect it may of been due to skipping animation frames. I remembered to save a .z80 of it!

Although sometimes difficult to see and only happened rarely (and this is not really that relevant!) when the 'Attic Bug' was in full swing it was occasionally possible to see the Barrel in Top Landing flickering between different colours. :)

I'd agree, its quite easy to do and there's some .zxk documentation to assist if needed, although generally looking at a few existing files (knowing the games in question) would be one alternative idea too. Only slight caveat and I could be completely mistaken is not to end up being 'short of keys' by mapping the functions you need 'in game' to the menu.

Excellent! :) :) Thank you for sharing this with us and the JSW/MM community.

I have noted you can confuse JSWED if you re-arrange the caverns, as in manually change the hard-coded parts for special rooms. I've never really had a need to use the 'patch' or JSWED's options to do this I've found it easier manually somehow. You can sometimes end up with a phantom green guardian in Central Cavern or if you're unlucky another one (this one causes an IDS) in Ore Refinery, but the latter is quite rare. :)

Well that would possibly depend on a definition of "soon" perhaps. :)

Now you mention it, that does sound familiar! :)

The issue of copyright is a slightly thorny one with this I suspect. I wonder if it is worth asking Yahoo!s views on it, given they are 'removing' it forever ? The deletion thought might be dealt with via GDPR requests perhaps on an individual basis. @Andrew , I'm assuming (as silly as it sounds) your email issue that you considered signing up a separate account aka hotmail/gmail etc with the express purpose of just using that email for the group itself ? That way you'd not have to disclose your 'real' one.

I'd never really realised in "To The Kitchens..." the item/object was a hatchet / meat-cleaver! I does actually look like one too!

I recalling reading the article in Crash many many many moons ago , and Quirkafleeg was still at that stage called 'Gaping Pit' , at least from my memory. It was a preview type of article. Will look at the RG issue in question to see, thanks. :) There was something I think in about Iss 5 (I can't check at the moment) discussing JSW in a few pages too.