Richard Hallas

Thanks a lot, Danny, that'll save me some hunting. I'll look into this when I can. Life's a bit demanding at present, but if I can find a bit of free time I'll see what I can do.

Hi Byron, I've certainly enjoyed the game – I've played it right through and it works very well. (A few tricky bits, but overall it's much easier than the original.) So yes, it's great; I Iike it a lot. My only real quibble, as I say, is with the title music. In theory I'd be happy to recreate the music myself, but aside from having very limited time available, I don't know anything about what format it's in. However, I could do a bit of research over the coming days and see if it's something I could tackle. I'm not familiar with working on JSW64 games myself, so if anyone could point me to the most up-to-date place for finding out about the engine (and specificially the music), that might be helpful. Otherwise I'll just do some hunting myself in the next day or two, assuming I get a bit of free time. Anyway, if the editor has a music import/export feature then it must surely be straightforward to create new music, and given that that's the case, I'm sure I'll be able to manage it. If you'd like me to do so, and are willing to wait a short while for me to have time to do it, then I'll be happy to help.

Another typo: "Khan" is spelt "Kahn" in the game.

Thanks very much for doing this! It's a really great conversion to have, and – again – something I've wished someone would do for a long time. I'm also pleased that you've given the caverns proper mixed-case names this time, as I really didn't care for the all-caps names in the Lost Levels release (my only major criticism of that game). I have two points of feedback that I've noticed so far, during my initial look, one trivial and one major: 1. In the title-screen scroll-text, you credit the "JSW46" engine (should obviously be JSW64). 2. The title screen music is just intolerably awful! I don't think this is your fault, Byron; I'm sure I've heard it before somewhere (is it the default music in JSW64 or something?) – but it should have been strangled at birth and badly needs to be replaced. I mean, the melody is OK and correct, but the accompaniment (a) is in completely the wrong key, and (b) doesn't fit even if it were in the right key – and the overall combination makes me wonder how on earth something that sounds so appallingly dreadful was ever created and released in the first place. As far as I'm concerned it really ruins the game, as I find it really hard to listen to it. No music at all on the title screen would be a far, far preferable alternative to this. I'm sorry if my comments about the music insult someone (e.g. John Elliott, if it's his handiwork), as I really don't want to offend anybody. Nevertheless, I find it hard to put into words just how dreadful the title-screen music really is. It's like a study in what it must be like to be tone deaf. I know the original Manic Miner title screen music is pretty screechy and awful, but I always took it as being an attempt at rendering a honky-tonk piano sound, and as far as it goes it's quite succesful at that; it works because it sounds 'deliberately bad' (and it's also in tune in its own terms, and uses valid harmony). This 128K AY rendition, though, fails because the notes are perfectly in tune but are just completely wrong (in the accompaniment line). Maybe the data is simply corrupt (seriously). Either way, it REALLY needs to be replaced with a fixed version or a competent new rendition, be it of The Blue Danube or of something else.

Hey, @The-Red-Bayron, well done! I've often thought it a pity that there was no version of The Lost Levels for the Spectrum. I've just been having an initial look and it appears that you've made a pretty good job of converting these levels. Yes, it would be nice if some of the special features from other versions could have been preserved (such as the fancy intermittent barriers that are unique to the BBC version, for example), but we can't expect miracles! For a conversion to the 'straight' Spectrum engine, this is as good as we could hope for, I think, and really nice to have. I've just got three points of feedback about what exists so far, though – two for you as author, and one for whoever maintains this site (@Spider?) 1. There's a typo in the DS version. Eddie's Forest is spelt EDDIE'S FORREST in the game – i.e. one R too many in Forest. It'd be nice if you could fix that, and it'd alleviate my OCD about such things! 🙂 2. There may be a good reason why you've done this (e.g. to match some of the other versions), but I'd personally MUCH prefer it if you could change all the room names to use "Title Case" rather than "ALL UPPER CASE". Some machines had to be in all upper case because that's all they could do, but the Spectrum original – and many other conversions – used mixed case names for all the rooms, and it really does look much better. So I for one would greatly appreciate it if you could adjust all the room names to match the approach used in the Spectrum original. 3. At present, only the original non-DS version appears to be linked in the Downloads section of this site. Unless I've missed something obvious…? And only that version has an RZX file by @Spider. The DS version really needs equal treatment to the non-DS version, so I'd suggest either adding it separately to the Downloads section, or perhaps instead combining the two games into a single download (with just the updated PDF ReadMe and cassette inlay files). That'd be the more efficient option, and one only really needs one set of documentation for both games. (And perhaps @Spider could do an RZX of the other version, too?) Oh, and a PS: The version of the cassette inlay that contains both DS and non-DS inlays is missing the DS spine with the blue telephone. It's there in the single-page-only PDF, but needs to be brought across to the two-page version. I hope that's all helpful. Anyway, thanks again for your great work! I'm really pleased that someone has done this at last!

I do use a Mac primarily, yes, and still RISC OS too, some of the time. I only use Windows when I have to, because I really dislike it. I do get frustrated, though, by the fact that so many of the emulators, editors and tools that I’d like to use are typically Windows only. Or Windows and Linux only, but never Mac. It’s though there’s a conspiracy only ever to support crap user interfaces! 😉 Nevertheless, there are still lots of options on the Mac, and plenty of Spectrum emulators (including two separate ports of Fuse). When I want to use PC software I typically use Parallels Desktop, which is an absolutely fantastic product and typically just as fast as a real PC. Or there are several Wine-based alternatives that perform really well too; CrossOver is a good commercial option with a range of enhancements, but there are several free Wine-based options. The complication of recent years, though, is the move from Intel to ARM in recent Apple Silicon Macs, as this has had ramifications in terms of PC emulation/virtualisation. Basically, it means that if you’re on a modern M-series Mac, then (a) you have to virtualise a recent ARM-based version of Windows under Parallels, and (b) a lot of the Wine-based options are Intel-only, so won’t work at all. But it could be worse. If you’re happy to use Windows 11 under virtualisation, then it’s likely to run everything you want, and as for Wine, CrossOver somehow still works (very well) on the latest M-chips – and new freeware options seem to keep appearing. Of course, it would still be vastly preferable to have native tools on the Mac, so if John or anyone else were to build JSWED for the Mac, I’d be extremely interested. At one point I did start making a half-hearted attempt to get JSWED working on the Mac myself. Unfortunately my personal circumstances these days are such that I have very little free time of my own in which to tinker, so I can’t say anything very useful about JSWED specifically, except that I’m sure it’d work in something like Parallels or CrossOver. But I’d love it if someone created a decent native port. If that happened, it’d probably give me the incentive to start on a new JSW game myself.

That’s interesting. In which case, the Eddie in question is Eddie Edwards, who wrote the original Archimedes ports of MM and JSW. (He’s still a Facebook friend of mine.) It’s a long time since I played them, so my memory is a bit hazy (and I don’t remember Eddie’s Forest at all, off the top of my head), but they were good ports. (Eddie later went on to write the Acorn 32-bit conversions of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. He also worked with Jon Ritman of Head Over Heels fame.) Eddie started out on a Dragon 32, which explains why his Archimedes version of JSW contains conversions of the extra screens from the Dragon version of the game. Just thought you people here might be interested in these anecdotal details… 🙂 By the way, Darren Salt also ported MM and JSW to RISC OS (his own original implementation of JSW with inbuilt level editor, and a straight conversion of Andy Noble’s PC remake of MM), but these came later; Eddie Edwards’ versions were first, and had some unique features (including memorably good in-game background music in JSW).

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…

For what it's worth… I am Mr Scratcher. (It's just an old nickname that I sometimes use online.) I stumbled across Bob Fossil's conversion of Manic Miner 128 to .tap format and was delighted to find it. But on playing it through, I found that it crashed in Skylab Landing Bay. I contacted him to let him know about the problem, and this led to his creating the two nice new versions that we now have. (He gave me a decent real-name credit in his new Bug-Byte version's loader.) You can read the correspondence in its entirety on his dedicated blog page: The Fossil Record: Room for Improvements.

Apparently it is. 🙂

Just as a quick follow-up… I finally got it! 🙂 My own Willy with crash helmet, as seen in Join the Jet-Set!. I requested the 'one foot in front of the other' pose, as I prefer it to the striding position.

Yes, I definitely fancy a lamp with my JTJS version of Willy in it. 🙂 I may be the only person who'd want such a thing, but I think Alan Grier will make one for me; I mentioned the possibility when ordering the one I've got, and he reacted positively. As for your animated illustration, yes, the cycling speed looks pretty similar. It's hard to judge a video like that against real life with LEDs, as they never seem to video as well as they look in real life, but I think the speed of fade is similar. Looking at my lamp in real life, the colours look more intense and the fading arguably smoother, but, as I say, it's probably to do with the video quality. Anyway, the colours produced by the lamp are certainly rich, intense and lovely.

I realised, but it was still worth considering! 🙂

Concerning the ideas for alternative images in the lamp… looking at mine, it's clear that if the same of image size is retained, there's room for a 10×16-pixel design, though note that the curvature of the 'tongue' could potentially affect the top three rows of pixels, so these need to occupy less than the full width. Doubtless it's possible to scale the designs down to fit more pixels in the available space, but still, it's clear that a tall (roughly 1.6:1) aspect ratio is going to work best. Unfortunately, the 'pointing Maria' sprite is nearly square (14×16), so she'd have to be scaled down quite a bit and would come far short of the curved top of the tongue. It's the pointing arm that's the problem, of course; in her folded-arms guise she'd fit a little better, though she's still dumpy compared with Willy (12×16), so would have to be shorter. Concerning the flying pig sprite, in its 'wing up' position it's actually 10×14 pixels, so that should work pretty well, though the top, curved part of the lamp will be largely empty. Also, it's an unfortunate fact that the top tip of the wing is a filled pixel just at the point where the lamp starts to curve, so fitting it in without clipping it may be a problem (assuming there's no scaling down), and even if it can be made to fit, it'll be very close to the edge of the perspex. Anyway, I'm sure that Alan Grier would be open to doing custom designs if approached, and he'll obviously be able to tackle any practical difficulties there may be with particular designs. I plan to ask him to do me another one featuring my version of Willy with a crash helmet from Join the Jet-Set!. And I'd think that a Miner Willy variant (with miner's lamp) would definitely be on the cards, since it's as iconic as JSW.