Spider

Waiting around too long can have two potential consequences: you might get hit by a fireball flare-up, but even if you manage to avoid that, if you crumble away all the cyan platforms near the portal, you may end up stranded on the lower level, with the flashing portal beyond reach! In fact, I thought you had made that mistake in one of your recordings (but it turned out that there was one crumbly cell with a pixel-row or two remaining, just within reach of the portal, so you managed to sneak out of there!)
**
Another unexpected difficulty can arise from the 'shadow' of the Skylabs passing over a column shortly before the deadly fireball arrives in that column. It can provide a helpful warning to take swift evasive action, as it briefly turns Willy's sprite yellow in advance of the deadly yellow pixels bursting out. But it can also make items temporarily uncollectable, if you try to jump up to collect them just at the moment that the yellow shadow passes through them and Willy! (Willy needs to have white INK in order to collect items.) It happened to me once, so I had to go back and try again for the item in question. Deliciously frustrating!

I should just add that, notwithstanding the name 'Eugene Lair', this cavern is more like a hybrid, conceptually speaking, of two original Manic Miner caverns:
- 'The Final Barrier' (aesthetically speaking, with the action all taking place in the bottom half of the playing area - although a strategically-placed pair of dancing pixels give the appearance of moving eyeballs to the [otherwise static] giant 'Eugene' printed at the top of the screen); and
- 'Skylab Landing Bay' - the fireballs are a very inventive and fiendishly tricky variation on Matthew's original Skylabs (they appear to be ascending rather than descending, and for most of their traverse they are INKless).
The version of the cavern which ended up in the official release of 'Ultimate Manic Miner' (with the 'Skylab' fireballs staying in their columns and not getting horizontally displaced, due to a flaw in the JSW64 game engine) really didn't do Igor Makovsky's original design justice.  Hence I was so determined to fix it!
For all of the above reasons, I really recommend people try out 'Eugene Lair as Manufacturer Intended' (via the above method, taking one of Danny's recordings as a starting point and 'seizing control' of the gameplay), even if they don't fancy traversing through the rest of 'Ultimate Manic Miner' to reach it.

Well done, Danny! I agree, the sense of panic is only increased if you don't have Rollback to rely on!  I think I did manage to do it once though (eventually!)
Because these are RZX recordings, I would suggest anyone who wants to have a go at this fiendish cavern 'as author intended', all they need to do is:
- load up one of the recordings in SPIN;
- once the gameplay starts, select 'Stop Playback' from the 'Recording' drop-down menu at the top of the emulator window;
- walk Willy leftwards into the portal of the start-up room (if that hasn't already happened by the time you stop the playback) ;
- emerge from the portal into 'Eugene Lair', and BEWARE THE FIREBALLS!!! 😜

Ian has provided a fixed version of "Ultimate Manic Miner", where both the Eugene Lair and some other issues are fixed. Attached are three playthroughs of the fixed "Eugene Lair" done using the modified file. I recorded them using the Rollback feature.
To be honest, when one plays using Rollback, I would say it's not a particularly difficult challenge - when you die, you roll back and try doing things differently, either by improving your movements (e.g. when you see you just need to move a little bit more quickly to get things right) or by choosing a different way ('let's go right instead of left at this time') or timing ('let's not go for those items now, but wait until the horizontal guardian has passed'). Of course the Rollback makes all the difference - playing this room without its assistance would certainly be a nightmare.
UMM fixed Eugene Lair 3.rzx UMM fixed Eugene Lair 2.rzx UMM fixed Eugene Lair 1.rzx

Was not aware Matthew wrote any other versions. Ist line I wrote
Apologies to the original person who modified Matthews code. (see below)

 

Good point about who entered the room. Though I guess you could have said "... after he entered the room [or cavern]". The player isn't really entering the room themself, just guiding Willy into and through there! 
To me, the distinction between rooms and caverns is that the latter have a portal for egress.

I guess many people like to stick to the 48K limit. (If you're going 'retro' with your games, then you may as well go the whole hog, and the 128K Spectrum came later than old rubber keys - although the ZX81 was even earlier, its 16KB limit perhaps takes that concept too far/limits the size of the games too much?) If you add up the MM(48) and JSW48 mods from your list above, they amount to about two-thirds of the total (with JSW128 and JSW64 games collectively only making up about a third).
So with that in mind - now that Norman Sword has managed to devise an optimised MM game engine which allows significantly more caverns within the 48KB constraint (how many more exactly? I don't believe Norman specified?), perhaps more such modified, more expansively cavernous games might be forthcoming in future?

Manic Miner Redux supports many thousands of rooms.
(What? The original post never mentioned "Spectrum"...)

Ian, thank you for the fix! 🙂 
Regarding another video of a walkthrough of "Ultimate Manic Miner" on the JSW Central YouTube channel, generally speaking, I am not planning to do it and I *hope* I won't ever have to do it.
The reason for this is that my strong policy (at this time, at least) is not to repeat videos of any games on the channel. I don't want to fall into the trap of feeling an urge to create a new video every time I improve a score in a MM game or the completion time in a JSW game or whatever. I also want to avoid games having parallel videos on the channel (and I don't want to erase old ones in order to make room for the new ones). I have already improved some scores in MM games and have not made any new videos resulting from these improvements.
If a new version of a game is released, with the blessing of the original author, it will create a serious dilemma for me, because it would be a good reason to repeat the walkthrough and post another video. This is why I said I "hope" that this will not happen. I haven't had to deal with such a situation yet, because all of the games I have made videos of so far were released "long ago enough" not to have any further versions released.
Another strong principle I have is to release final versions of each game approved by the original author, *unless* the game is incompletable and there is no clear hope of reaching the author to produce or approve a bugfix. In such case, I would go ahead and showcase the game with a third-party bugfix. Another rule is that I would not present an incompletable game (except for special cases, perhaps, like the artistic modifications of the original JSW - it remains to be seen what I will do with them). Please note I am talking about fixing critical bugs here, the ones that make a game incompletable, not just any bugs.
You're right that your suggestion came too late for my video of "UMM" in that it has already been made. However, even if you had made it earlier, I couldn't have implemented it, because it would go against my principles: of the author's approval of the fix and of not bothering about non-critical bugs in gamma-released games. The situation could only have been different if the suggestion had been made earlier and if Igor had released an updated revision of the game before I set out to make the video.
Incidentally, there *are* some problems with Igor's old games. "Jet Set Willy 5: ZX Heroes" shows there are 255 items to collect - and there are 256 in fact (Igor might have fixed it in the past, because I remember Andrew Broad mentioning that he was in possession of a later version of the game than the one that had been released publicly, but Igor certainly did not release a fixed version). Also, his "Frosya the Cat" / "Frosya the Cat" Light Version game is still incompletable (only its third and final incarnation, "Jet Cat Frosya", can be completed), and these first two "incarnations" are probably also worth presenting. I will face this problem in the next few months, when their turn comes for the JSW Central videos. I will probably prepare bugfixed versions and try to get Igor to approve of them before making the videos.

Yes, I'll definitely do that. I will upload it right here.
 
That's correct. My 'policy' for making the walkthroughs is to complete each game without losing any lives (unless necessary to collect an item or more) and doing it as efficiently as possible, resulting in a score in a MM game that will be as high as possible or the completion time in a JSW game that will be as good (early) as possible.*
As a result, if there are rooms in JSW games that the player doesn't have to visit in order to complete the game, they may be omitted in my walkthrough. "May" (not "will") because it depends on whether going through this room/these rooms is propitious to completing the game as efficiently as possible. If it is, you will see them in the walkthrough. If it's not, they won't be showcased.
The two rooms you've mentioned fall into the latter category and therefore are not present in my walkthrough. Nevertheless, I am grateful to Igor for this personal tribute (I am positive I'm "the Danny" it refers to 😉). The absence of the room in the walkthrough is a testament to the fact that I do stick to my 'policy' while creating the walkthroughs 😉 .
* "as efficiently as possible" within reasonable limits. I do not strive to achieve the maximum possible scores, like the ones determined (scientifically and via a 'peer review' LOL) for "MM". They have not been determined for the other games, so I don't know what they are. And even if I knew, producing pixel-perfect walkthroughs would require an investment of significantly much more time and energy than producing just 'decent' walkthroughs. I would not consider this 'investment' justified.

I wonder if all the other 'tributees' are aware of their 8-bit representation in the Manic Miner Pub in UMM?

Yes please, it will be appreciated!

Do you want me to DM you a copy of the fixed gamefile, with the starting room/position set to the appropriate place?

Sorry, I should have said 'The Mine Vehicle Department' there, not the MM Pub. 

JSWED has NO optimisation of code/data space in Manic Miner. It is a very simple data editor. So my statement still stands.
 

Must admit I had not heard of a version for this, at least not an "official" one.
Tynesoft did release as mentioned JSW for other machines:

Thanks for this info, Richard!
It's weird and amazing at the same time that today there are people who port 30- or 40-year-old then-mainstream games from (what most people would call) an obsolete platform to an obscure and even more obsolete platform, equally old platform. What a wonderful - and bizarre - world! 😉  

Apologies to the original person who modified Matthews code. (see below)

Last week I wondered why Manic Miner has been left languishing as a little used format for code change. It seems the vast majority of game edits use the 64 room game version of Jet Set Willy as the basics for new games, and Manic Miner seems to have, in the main, been ignored.
The limited scope of Manic Miner might be the reason, just 20 caverns, whilst JSW manages a max of 64 (on a 48k zx spectrum)

I wondered if it was or would be easy to write a piece of code that compacted the game slightly. I personally have no need for such gimmicks. If I need more space, I will just rewrite the code. A quick rewrite as demonstrated in Manic 40 Miner takes very little effort. But I task myself with just writing code for the sake of writing code so, how hard is a universal compaction piece of code for Manic Miner?

The answer is it took me a couple of hours to write a routine that compacted the game. It was at that point I delved into archives looking for versions to try my code on. That was when I discovered that the great multitude of Manic Miner versions I wanted to test my code on did not exist.  
I modified Matthews original code with no problem.
I modified some other version - but that had no need of the addition I added (e.g. the font change)
I knew of a recent listed modification of Matthews Manic Miner and that was used as a basis for demonstrating what the code I wrote could do.

The version I decided to modify was Manic Person (human Version).
So included here is a demonstration of the game -- Manic Miner -- Modified by a simple (for me) piece of code that does basic code modifications to the game.
The demo does go a bit further and uses the freed space. The text added is deliberately long winded --- (it is just a demo of what can be done)
The included demo - will be deleted in a week. It is NOT a version that is available for general public release. 
 
and has now been deleted -----  New code has been added (see addendum)- the new code is just the original Manic Miner
 
Let the demo play through to the final cavern and on---

Ending the post.
The universal code I wrote is in a format that will modify the basic code of Manic Miner and then return to Basic or Enter the modified game code and play the game.
That code is not included here.
The big question I ask myself is. Why has no one bothered to do this simple task? As stated elsewhere the code took just a few hours.


ADDENDUM.
Since this was missing a file demonstrating what I was talking about.  A non edited version of Manic Miner has been run through my optimisation routine.
Wait until the end of the 20 caverns to be displayed in the demo mode.  THE text is in addition to other optimisations that have been performed. Note - this program has not been edited to fix any other code- so the pause bug and any other original problems, may still exist.
 
 
MANIC-C.TAP

I believe the various reasons you mention do point to it being 'back from the day'.
It's new to me. But that doesn't mean much, because I focus on the Spectrum games, and while I read information like you have presented here with interest and have a general idea of versions for other platforms, I don't try to keep track of them or have them 'catalogued' in my mind in any way.
But I'm sure others will tell if they've been aware of its existence before. In particular, Andy (Spider) is the person to say if he's seen it already, as he has presented versions for various platforms on these pages (including videos) and seems to be 'in the know' 😉 .
 

I agree – and it appears that that's what's probably happened with Alien8 and some other familiar titles.
But JSW? Surely that's authentic, isn't it? The scrolltext pictured in the video says that the Lynx port is by Tim Titchmarsh for Phoenixx Softwarre (note the double letters!), and it doesn't appear to be a straight port of any other existing version.
I've tried Googling Tim Titchmarsh in association with Phoenix/Phoenixx and Lynx, and I haven't found any results – which you'd imagine there probably would be if this were a modern conversion. But if it dates from 1984, it's obscure enough to not have been recorded online. Also, the forum poster who provided the tape (and credits the game to Tynesoft rather than Software Projects) refers to having gone through his "old" Lynx tapes and transferred them – and JSW was one of them. (Notably, the other possibly modern conversions, like Alien8, were not from this source.) He also mentions that the tapes are over 35 years old. This all certainly points to Lynx JSW being authentic from 1984.
Was it known about already by any members of this site, or is it new to all of us?
Whether it's really from 1984 or is a more modern conversion is immaterial in a sense, if it's a new platform that wasn't previously known either way; it's one more new version of JSW to catalogue either way. But it'd be quite nice to think that it's a new discovery of a previously unknown yet authentic 1984 conversion, as that'd make it one more platform for JSW to have appeared on back in the 80s.

Hi all,
I was browsing YouTube recently and came across a video that claimed to demo ALL the games ever published for the Camputers Lynx. Unfortunately it's in French, but never mind. It's broken into chapters and just shows a bitesized bit of gameplay for each game listed. (I'm really not convinced that it's actually complete, as claimed, not least because I know that there were at least three early Level 9 adventures for the machine, and I don't see any of them demoed here, but that's by the by…)
Anyway, to my great surprise, one of the included games is JSW! As published by Tynesoft rather than Software Projects (like the BBC versions), apparently. Until seeing this video, I'd no idea that there was a version of JSW for the Lynx. Indeed, I didn't know of any 'mainstream' games for it – but it turns out that there was a handful of 'big name' games for it, including, notably, Ultimate's Alien8, Melbourne House's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and Mined Out! by Quicksilva, plus a few other familiar lesser ones like Oh Mummy. But the highlight for me was seeing a version of JSW that I'd never previously known existed.
Here's the video, with playback starting at the JSW segment:
JSW for Camputers Lynx on YouTube
As you can see, it's an 'interesting' version: plenty colourful, with quite authentic Spectrum-like graphics, but with some weird differences, such as Willy changing colour in each room (including the hard-to-see blue on black combination), and with AWFUL stepped staircases like in the Commodore 64 version. There's also weird corruption in the lower part of the screen (maybe an emulator issue, maybe not) and the in-game music sounds awful (like it sounds when you've lost multiple lives in the Specturm version, but from the outset here).
A quick search revels that the archive containing the game tape file (and, separately, a disked version) can be found here, in a forum thread:
JSW for Camputers Lynx in tape and disk formats
I don't have a conveniently set up emulator to try these out myself, but I thought I should mention the subject here in case it's useful information. I doubt I'm the only JSW fan who previously had no idea there was a Lynx version. (Shame there doesn't appear to be Manic Miner too.) I previously thought the most obscure versions of JSW were those for Memotech and Einstein machines, but I really didn't know of ANY commercial software for the Lynx until the other day.
UPDATE:
Hm, further investigations suggest that some of the big-name titles (notably Alien8, and probably the Melbourne House adventures from the way they look) may well be modern conversions from the Spectrum originals. I'm not entirely sure. However, the JSW conversion does appear to be authentic, from back in the day…

It'll depend on what programming experience you have already.
1. If you've not done any coding before at all, I definitely wouldn't recommend starting with assembly - follow a Python tutorial (effectively the modern BASIC) and learn the basic concepts before tackling assembly.
2. If you have knowledge of higher-level languages but have never done any assembly, Z80 isn't a bad place to start with that. You could follow the links in 3 and it wouldn't be too difficult. However, I do want to give a special shoutout to MarkeyJester's Motorola 68000 Beginner's Tutorial, as even though it's for a more complex processor it really does break everything down and you can apply the knowledge and concepts to every assembly language out there. I definitely recommend reading it, even if you're not interested in 68k ASM.
3. If you've done assembly before or read MJ's tutorial, or you're just feeling brave, then I'd go with two links. Patai Gergely has a breakdown of the Z80 that makes good initial reading for a surface level understanding. And then there's ChibiAkumas which will take you through the entire process of actually getting Z80 programs running. It's initially CPC-based but at the end of the day Z80 is Z80 and it covers a whole bunch of other platforms later.

I've noticed many users of this forum talk "Z80" assembly. What is the best resource out there for learning Z80 in 2024?
It could be a series of modern YT tutorials, or a gem of a book that was written in the 70's/80's.
I'm curious if these was a single resource that made it "click" for anyone.
Thanks.

Nopping out #8B47 and #8B49 would do but its too fast then. So...

XOR A                            ;8B3C      ;                  clear the inactivity timer at L85E0      LD (inactivity),A            ;8B3D      ;L85E0     LD D,A                           ;8B40      ;                   initialise the mSB     LD a,(game ticker)       ;8B41      ;L85CB        the game ticker at 85CB     AND 1                            ;8B44      ;                   issolate odd or even game ticker bit     LD HL,(ingame_music) ;8B46      ;L865F        set HL to the music offset pointer     LD E,(HL)                       ;8B49      ;                   get the present offset     ADD A,E                        ;8B4A      ;                   add the ticker (odd/even) value     LD (HL),A                      ;8B4B      ;                   store the updated offset    NOP                              ; 8b4C      ; back to the original code    LD HL,ingame_music    ;8B4D     ;L865F    ADD HL,DE                    ; 8B50    ; >>> HL IS POINTING AT THE NOTE value

Actually Andy, you might need to think again there. Did you actually try that out? Because looking at it again, E isn't actually updated when the tune note index is increased, so when DE is added to HL (the second definition of HL) at #8B50, it won't pick up the new note during the current pass through the Main Loop.
So you would need to use that spare, NOPped out byte at #8B4C for a LD E, A instruction.
Edit: Thinking about it, the effect of E not being updated straight away probably just means that the tune will be playing 'one note behind'. It should play at the right speed. But the first note (first pitch value) will only play half as long as it should when you start playing the game. (And the normal fix for that - setting the music note index to #FF during game initialisation - won't work this time; I think that would cause the last note of the tune to be played during the first pass through the Main Loop.)