selfdelmer

Wow, impressive. Nice work. For me, Manic Miner is just the epitome of that time, it's great to see it so well remembered and regarded still.

Hello,
after more than 40 years, I haven't stopped playing with the Zx Spectrum and spreading the enthusiam for it.

I've recently bought 'The Spectrum' from RetroGaming and I have to say that it delivers an experience very similar to the orginal Speccy.
It is so close to the 'original' that it doesn't have a "modern" way to enter pokes.

Thus, to play and practice Manic Miner I had two possible choice:
- breaking to basic and poking the old fashion way... quite nostalgic, but very boring and unpractical;
- hack Manic Miner to add a "cheat menu".

I choosed the latter.

It took a while for the memories of Z80 assembly to arise, but little by little I remembered enough to hack into MM code.
Thanks to the complete disassembly by Richard Dymond I had a solid base to work on.

The project, as well as the assembled TAP files, can be found in the GitHub repo:
https://github.com/pacrox/MANIC-MINER_PAK


This is an extract from the README:



Some screenshots taken with Zesarux:





 
Running on 'The Spectrum':


Best,
P.

Hi JianYang, yes I may tweak level 4 a bit. Thanks for the suggestions.
BTW press f2 to jump levels if you want to.

Hi All,
After doing a remake of Manic Miner in GameMaker, I thought I'd use the same engine to create some new levels. Please see the attached zip (just extract and run) of the progress so far. Only 7 levels at the moment and the game will crash after you complete level 7.
Any ideas on what the additional levels could be perhaps?
Regards,
SDelmer.
 
RetroWilly.zip

Hi JianYang, yes I may tweak level 4 a bit. Thanks for the suggestions.
BTW press f2 to jump levels if you want to.

Hi All,
After doing a remake of Manic Miner in GameMaker, I thought I'd use the same engine to create some new levels. Please see the attached zip (just extract and run) of the progress so far. Only 7 levels at the moment and the game will crash after you complete level 7.
Any ideas on what the additional levels could be perhaps?
Regards,
SDelmer.
 
RetroWilly.zip

Hi SymbolShift,
Glad you found the document helpful, I hope others will also. My personal opinion would be to use the original mechanics warts and all. For me, if the movement is different it just feels like a totally different game. That isn't always a bad thing and if you get close to the original movement and also eradicate all bugs, then great.
Regards.
 

Hi SymbolShift,
Glad you found the document helpful, I hope others will also. My personal opinion would be to use the original mechanics warts and all. For me, if the movement is different it just feels like a totally different game. That isn't always a bad thing and if you get close to the original movement and also eradicate all bugs, then great.
Regards.
 

Hi SymbolShift,
Glad you found the document helpful, I hope others will also. My personal opinion would be to use the original mechanics warts and all. For me, if the movement is different it just feels like a totally different game. That isn't always a bad thing and if you get close to the original movement and also eradicate all bugs, then great.
Regards.
 

Yes, jump to 8 was incorrect, it should have been jump to 12 as you suggested (well spotted), here's an updated version.
MM movement and collision detection v03.pdf

Yes, jump to 8 was incorrect, it should have been jump to 12 as you suggested (well spotted), here's an updated version.
MM movement and collision detection v03.pdf

Great, thanks for checking. I'll check also, and update if required.

Please see a new version below, that includes a few grammatical corrections.
MM movement and collision detection v02.pdf

Please see a new version below, that includes a few grammatical corrections.
MM movement and collision detection v02.pdf

Please see a new version below, that includes a few grammatical corrections.
MM movement and collision detection v02.pdf

Please see the later replies below for a corrected version of the PDF
Hi All,
I've written a pdf that attempts to describe the original ZX Spectrum's Manic Miner movement and collision routines as written by Sir Matthew Smith.
I hope this will be useful for those brave coders that attempt to recreate Willy's movement. If the pseudo code shown is implemented correctly, it should result in perfect Willy movement, including conveyor movement logic. This is the approach I took to when writing my implementation for Game Maker 2 and I think it worked quite well. A shout out goes to the excellent Skoolkit.ca manic miner page here that describes each assembly code step.
A windows version of my Game Maker 2 version can be found here
Any questions or corrections, please let me know.
Regards,
SDelmer.
MM Movement and collision detection v01.pdf

OK, updated to v04 to correct the misspelling and precise per frame is set.

OK, updated to v04 to correct the misspelling and precise per frame is set.

Thanks CPL. I think I did set precise per frame, but I'll check it over the weekend and correct the misspelling.

Thanks CPL. I think I did set precise per frame, but I'll check it over the weekend and correct the misspelling.

OK, updated to v04 to correct the misspelling and precise per frame is set.

Thanks CPL. I think I did set precise per frame, but I'll check it over the weekend and correct the misspelling.

View File GameMaker 2 Manic Miner for Windows
A remake of the ZX Spectrum version of Manic Miner by Matthew Smith using GameMaker 2 for Windows. 
It started as a small project to learn GameMaker 2 to see if I could reproduce just the first level with accurate movements and 'sprites'. Once the first level was completed, I just had to finished it off.
No installation required, just extract the zip and run the mm.exe file.
Please note, if you want some help enter 6031769 for unlimited lives, you can also use f1 and f2 to skip through levels, press escape to go back to the title.
 
 
 
Submitter selfdelmer Submitted 08/23/2025 Category Manic Miner [Remakes]  

Ah yes, silly mistake now fixed v0.3 uploaded. Thanks for testing.

Ah yes, silly mistake now fixed v0.3 uploaded. Thanks for testing.