krazyminer

Hi guys!

I just did not even know this Tatung Einstein version existed. I have written a brief article on Einstein Manic Miner:

https://kolttonen.fi/computers_and_logic/retrocomputing/manic_miner_on_tatung_einstein/manic_miner_on_tatung_einstein.html

Feel free to copy anything you wish to this site. I am not sure if it is interesting, but I would recommend getting the ZIP that contains 20 different disk images. Like I say in the article, I could not find a ML Monitor feature in MAME, so I wrote two simple C programs to create separate disk images for each room. This means that you can now start the Tatung Einstein Manic Miner in any room you wish! It is a bit clumsy to have to load a different image, but it works.

I actually tried The Final Barrier and to my surprise this version has a proper ending! Miner Willy ascends up to the ground and the game ends!

Hi again! If you want copy any Manic Miner information from my page, and republish it here, you are free and very welcome to do so!!! :thumbsup:

Few more pics, I could do with a cheat really I think. Will have to research that:

 

Hi Spider! I did not notice this thread earlier. I have completed C16 Manic Miner in the spring of 2010, I think I did it six times in a row, one single game, no cheats, no emulation, it was on a real C16 hardware.

I wrote a small article documenting some of the differences between C16 and C64 versions in 2010:

https://kolttonen.fi/computers_and_logic/retrocomputing/manic_miner/manic_miner_c16_and_c64.html

You can find one C16 cheat there, it enables free transport to any room. If you have a different, perhaps trained or cracked C16 release, then my hack might not work.

In that case, you can leech the C16 from that same page, I think it should work. I practiced beforehand using that version on a VICE emulator! :D

Spider, many thanks for the tip! Using ZIP made a huge difference. The AVI files compressed something like 93%, going from 163MB to only 9MB. I uploaded the videos in one ZIP file here, they are in the "Other resources" section. If the YouTube videos look awful and blurred, you can download the ZIP file, uncompress it and try to see the AVI files using a video player. On Fedora Linux 27, mplayer worked fine, but I am pretty sure others will too!

I will publish all videos on YouTube soon. I intend to complete the last four rooms if I can, then gonna make the videos public.

 

Hi guys! I am happy to say I have completed all 32 ORIC Manic Miner rooms now. But not in a row, of course. Just practicing each room individually with infinite lives enabled.

The first 16 rooms I did not document with video captures, the second half containing the last 16 screens on the other hand IS documented. I wrote a small article about this mission:

http://kolttonen.fi/computers_and_logic/retrocomputing/oric_manic_miner_videos/oric_manic_miner_videos.html

For reasons unknown to me, with some web browsers the YouTube videos are clear, with others they are ugly and blurred. I have the original Oricutron emulator's AVI video capture files and I can share them if there is a place to upload them. My kolttonen.fi site has limited storage space, so I cannot host the AVI files there. They are 163MB in total.

EDIT: If you guys want to embed those YouTube videos directly to this fantastic site, just go ahead! The link above points to a simple HTML page, the code can be copied from there.

I will publish all videos on YouTube soon. I intend to complete the last four rooms if I can, then gonna make the videos public.

Regarding Oricutron, it works fine on Linux. I have packaged it for Fedora Linux for easy installation.

Regarding House of Usher, yes, it is a crazy platformer for C64, Amstrad, Atari. The relevance is that it too contains INVISIBLE platforms, making the game near impossible to play. Manic Miner is hard, sure, but House of Usher is so hard it is... well, unplayable for most people, including me.

I kept on pushing, rooms 27 and 28 now completed too! Only four more rooms to go. But I am now too exhausted to continue. The ORIC specific rooms are now done and I got video captures of all of them!!!

Okay, I drank a can of energy drink and started practicing. After twenty attempts or so, I finally completed room 26, In A Deep Dark Hole. I actually completed it TWICE. Before the first successful attempt, I forgot to press F10 in Oricutron, so there was no video capture. If I can complete the rest of the ORIC specific rooms, I will publish the videos as examples of how you could complete this game.

Channel Tunnel is the next room, it looks horrifying to be sure.

'Channel Tunnel' screen/room/cavern ? :)

I completed rooms 23, 24 and 25 today. But room 26 is like a nightmare! It contains INVISIBLE platforms so it is pure guesswork trying to make progress! I think this room is pretty lame, as it depends on your luck rather than skill!

Well done! :)

 

I have an image of the codecard floating about, but originals are nice to have to hand too.

 

Is the falling pattern in Skylabs random in that version ( I forget :unsure: ) generally in other versions there *is* a pattern / sequence / cycle (pick which you prefer to call it) that is followed. The best way really is to simply stay on the floor area out of the way if you can and watch it a few times.

There is a patterm, I believe, but I am too stupid to spot it. So I learned one way to complete the level and always did the same moves until I made it. But I am unable to

Thanks, the extra caves look fantastic. I have been looking for the original ORIC tape (or disk!) release for eight years. No luck so far, sadly!

I found the ORIC Manic Miner original tape, complete with the colour code chart!

And using Oricutron, I have completed the first 22 rooms, but not in a row. I practiced each room many times. The most horrible room, in my opinion, is the Skylab Landing Bay. It is completely insane because you do not know where the landing enemies will come from! Room 22, The End Of The World was difficult too. It took me 35 attempts to succeed.

Yes, I tried room number 17, Home At Last, using the uncracked, presumably original files (MANIC0.TAP loaded first, it will load MANIC1.TAP). There was no corruption. I also tried one or two other rooms that were previously corrupted. They were okay now. So I suppose the tape files are good.

I would suggest removing the ORIC MM that is downloadable here. It would be pretty horrible if someone played through the first sixteen rooms only to find out that Home At Last cannot be completed.

I'm not sure if this has been mentioned before, but have you tried this download?

No, I downloaded the manic_cheat.zip from oric.org and the needed colour code chart. It contains the code verification so it appears to be a clean original without any cracker mods.

The version I tried, and redistributed on my page, is the one downloaded from this page. Does anybody have an alternative ORIC Manic Miner version?

A clean original would be best, with the key code copy protection intact and a dump of the original color code map. At least we would know it is okay.

EDIT: I found one from oric.org, but I do not know how to load it with Oricutron. There is a file called manic_cheat.zip there and it contains different versions.

MANIC0.TAP is the loader for the MANIC1.TAP (original tape), I guess. According to the docs we should load MANIC0.TAP first and according to my understanding it would load MANIC1.TAP. But I know nothing of ORIC, I cannot get loading to work. :mellow:

EDIT2: Finally good news! I got loading to work, it was a simple error on my part. So to load the ORIC Manic Miner from oric.org with Fedora Linux Oricutron, I did:

/opt/oricutron/bin/oricutron --tape MANIC0.TAP

After that Oric Atmos emulation will respond "Searching...".

You have to press F1 and select "Insert Tape", then Choose MANIC1.TAP and it will load!!!

Note that this version is not hacked, it is the clean original, so it contains the color code verification. But no problem, you can get the color chart from oric.org too!

I plan to redistribute them on my site, too, for easy download to Fedora Linux Oricutron downloaders. Maybe you should grab those files to share, too!

Hello guys!

I am sad to say I have very bad news indeed! :wacko:

ORIC Manic Miner TAP with SHA1 checksum:

7875d03b37fbae562858ff58fb9e83302c2742c0

seems to be corrupted (or my "select room" hack could be broken!). I just practiced ORIC Manic Miner with infinite lives and I made it to the seventeenth room "Home At Last" (I started from The Sixteenth Cavern).

So the room 17 was corrupted and likewise are all these:

17 - home at last

19 - down the pit
21 - at the centre of the earth
28 - not central cavern
30 - amoebatrons' revenge
31 - solar powered generator
 

This is a horrible setback. I must try to find another TAP file and test with it. :(

You're welcome. :) That particular compilation is only available here, I built it using stardot's game files, with a few filename changes to make them sit nicely onto one disk properly (and work!) , this is why there's the 'credit line' for stardot as well as here.

 

Pleased to know you've enjoyed it though. :thumbsup:

Great work! It is nice to have them on one virtual disk! Good working versions, this is cool. When did you form this site? I have been a MM and JSW fan since 1983. Well worth having a community of their own. These games are legendary and must not be forgotten.

You may be interested in this then perhaps. :)

 

 

 

This includes both the 'tape' and 'disk' version of JSW2 as they are different even though these days they are mostly disk based. Summary simply is the 'disk' version mirrors other versions and loads rooms from disk as you play, whereas the 'tape' version retains most of the 'space station' rooms but has very few mansion rooms.

 

You'll see what I mean about the flickering effect though, if you compare Manic Miner to JSW (either version)

Yeah, thanks! I downloaded the compilation and tried Jet Set Willy on B-em emulator. JSW is technically superior to the BBC Micro Manic Miner, there is no flicker, JSW seems smooth and agile to my eyes. I guess I have to try out more JSW ports, but the game is sooooo difficult and scary. :D

Thanks. :D I'll have a go at this later. :thumbsup:

 

Have you noticed that the 'game engine' is different between MM and JSW on this platform ? Compared to other platforms at least. By this I mean generally MM on the BBC is quite slow and the Miner sprite especially is very flickery, at least compared to JSW. Not quite sure why its like the BBC version of MM 'needs' the JSW 'core' in it, to control/print sprites. :unsure:

No, I did not know it. I have seen Jet Set Willy only on C64.

Hello! Inspired by the ORIC port, I wanted to try the BBC Micro version too. I wanted two features for practicing:

- infinite lives

- ability to select rooms at will

That required a pretty ugly hack to B-em emulator to enable RAM dumps and RAM writes at emulation runtime. I wrote a rather detailed article about the Manic Miner hacking:

http://kolttonen.fi/computers_and_logic/retrocomputing/manic_miner_on_bbc_micro/manic_miner_on_bbc_micro.html

Sorry, B-em 2.2.3kk and thus the Manic Miner hacks are available only for Linux. I offer my unofficial hacked B-em 2.2.3kk binary RPM for Fedora Linux 27 and there is also a source RPM available. The source RPM might compile easily on other RPM based Linux distributions. You can also extract the source RPM with rpm2cpio to compile from tar.gz on pretty much any Linux, I suppose.

Have fun!

Talking of collections / collecting, you may want to speak to Dasse actually as this topic may prove interesting. :)

What a nice collection! I think I have: C64, MSX, Dragon, BBC, C16, Amstrad and three different ZX Spectrum releases. I do not want Mastertronic rereleases or modern stuff, just 8-bit. ORIC release would be cool to have!

Hello Spider! I just wrote a small article about this nice ORIC Manic Miner. I do not know if you allow links but here it is:

http://kolttonen.fi/computers_and_logic/retrocomputing/manic_miner_on_oric/manic_miner_on_oric.html

It illustrates two very small hacks to get infinite lives and to enable room selection. The POKEs I found on the web would not work for me.

Thanks, the extra caves look fantastic. I have been looking for the original ORIC tape (or disk!) release for eight years. No luck so far, sadly!