Richard Hallas

Oh yes, indeed they do. I think the new BBC and Electron conversions are brilliant, and show what was theoretically possible back in the day if you really took the trouble to do a good conversion job. It's worth pointing out, though, that to some extent it's been achieved by clever techniques such as changing screen mode partway down the screen (in effect) so that the upper part of the display is in one mode and the lower in another. In effect, that allows for two benefits: less screen memory being wasted unnecessarily, and more colours being displayed at once than is theoretically possible. It's quite a common trick on the BBC to mix two or more screen modes in this way (e.g. in Elite, the instrument display at the bottom of the screen is in a different screen mode than the wireframe 3D graphics and text display in the main area above it), and its main downside is that it's quite hard for the programmer to do! Anyway, yes, the new BBC versions of MM and JSW are indeed much closer to the originals than the official conversions. They look better, play better and are smoother, faster and less flickery. A real expert job. Of course, to be fair to the original programmer, the conversions done back in the 80s were probably produced under much greater time pressure, and the programmer back then may not have been familiar with certain techniques that are well known to today's retro hobbyists. I don't mean to be unkind about the original BBC conversions; at least BBC versions were released back then! But the modern releases are, of course, hobby projects, written by an enthusiast who really knows what he's doing, in his own time without pressure to be ready for a commercial deadline, so of course they're very much better.

I thought it must be something like that. The Spectrum (especially the 48K version) was fairly unusual for having a comparatively large amount of free memory available, partly because 48K was relatively generous compared to the 32K that was common on many other machines, and the fact that its screen required only a little under 7K of it, leaving loads of room for code and data. There was a little over 40K of usable RAM on a 48K Spectrum, which was a lot, really. Contrast in particular with the BBC Micro. That too was a great machine with many fantastic features, but it was so hampered by its lack of RAM and its hungry screen modes. A decade later, Acorn's approach to screen modes showed its worth on the Archimedes range, but on the BBC they demanded an uncomfortably high percentage of available RAM. A 32K BBC Micro only had about 27K of usable RAM at best, and then the more demanding screen modes (the ones with high resolutions or all the available colours) ate up 20K of it, leaving only around 7K or so for the program. (You could compare it to a 16K Spectrum in terms of available program/data memory.) This is why I was always such a supporter of the Spectrum's eccentric approach to its screen display. Yes, character-level colour resolution (leading to the dreaded attribute clash) was a major compromise, BUT it did mean that you could always have full resolution and all the colours on the screen at once, with no further sacrifices to be made… and it still took up only a very modest amount of RAM. Not only was it a great solution to the problem, but it gave the Spectrum most of its character! The BBC's trick up its sleeve was Teletext (MODE 7) graphics, and that brought similar benefits: a colourful screen mode with a useful resolution (40x25 characters) in only 1K of RAM. Very useful, but its big compromises were (a) character-based colours AND graphics and (b) graphics of only an extremely low resolution (2x3 per character space). This did, of course, mean that you couldn't really do graphical games in Teletext, other than mainly text adventures with very primitive illustrations. Mind you, having said that, it's not long since someone produced a version of Elite (yes, the 3D space game) that runs entirely in Teletext mode, just to prove a point. (It has extremely low resolution graphics, as you'd expect, but it works and is an interesting novelty.) Anyway, I know very little about the Lynx, but with 96K or 128K of RAM and graphics with pixel-resolution colour, it ought in theory to have been able to do really impressive things. It's a shame that it apparently had such limitations as it did (i.e. extremely slow graphics handling and seemingly an inability to scroll its screen – based on reviews I've read in the past). Even so, games like JSW ought to have worked well on that machine, I'd have thought. As a matter of interest regarding the Jynx emulator… I'm interested to notice that on its Github page, there's already provision for a Mac build, and the author explicitly says he'd like a RISC OS version too, particularly for use on the Raspberry Pi. (RISC OS is an OS very close to my heart.) The only reason these things don't exist is that no-one with the appropriate expertise has stepped up to do the porting, which is a great shame. It's a pity that Jynx wasn't written sooner, because RISC OS actually used to be absolutely awash with good emulators; it was by far the best platform for emulating other systems at one time, and I can think of a few people from years gone by who'd probably have jumped at the chance of producing a RISC OS version of Jynx. But the world moves on…

Thanks for all that. That's odd about JSW not loading on a 48K machine, because the advert does imply that there's a reduced-size version of the game for that system. Given that both sizes of machine were available at the same time, the implication is that the game distinguishes between them and loads the appropriate code. (Or perhaps there's a cut down version on the other side of the tape?) Anyway, if the version that's been preserved is the full one then that's the most important thing. I also find it curious that a 96K Lynx was needed to run JSW in full anyway, since the game was written originally for the 48K Spectrum, and its code and data is in fact only 32K in size anyway! But of course, the Lynx is a totally different system architecture, and maybe it needs loads of memory for its screen, for example. (The Spectrum's screen was very efficient, at under 7K.) I'll look into Jynx, thanks. Shame there's no Mac version, but I'm sure it'll run under Crossover or some other emulation/virtualisation option.

I looked up the source of the above advert – thanks, Mike, for the link. There are some pretty interesting-looking Lynx newsletters to be found in the archive. Unfortunately, there's very little to go on in terms of dates, and this newsletter (Lynx User Group, volume 1 issue 3) contains no such information that I could spot. However, having said that, I've concluded that it comes from 1985. Looking through it, I was interested to discover a review of the Lynx version of Jet Set Willy on page 3. I suppose it's quite possible that other such newsletters will have reviewed the game, but this is, to date, the only review of the Lynx version I've seen anywhere, so I thought it might be interesting to reproduce it here. Interesting points to note: 1. Apparently the game took a year to appear on the Lynx after its release on the Spectrum. JSW was released in 1984, so I presume the game and this newsletter must have been published in 1985. 2. The Lynx version was apparently supplied with the Spectrum version of the cassette inlay! 3. From the reviewer's experience, the Lynx version is more demanding than the Spectrum original (which can only mean that its collision detection is less precise, since the Spectrum version is pixel-perfect), and apparently contains a bug in the Wine Cellar which is not in the Spectrum original (though Spectrum bugs are not reproduced on the Lynx either). Anyway, here's a transcription of the review. It's been done via OCR (I didn't retype it!), and the formatting maintains the single-column presentation of the original (from page 3 of the newsletter). The text is unedited, except that I've corrected a small handful of typos. JETSETWILLY *********** Many popular home computer magazines voted JETSET WILLY the Spectrum game of the year in 1983, which shows how far behind the LYNX tags behind in the software stakes. Still, it’s a ‘classic’ game, and none the worse for its age a year in home computing is a long time! JETSET is actually the ‘sequel’ to MANIC MINER, but many people rate it a better game. The object of the game is to guide the hero, Willy, around his mansion after a party, collecting all the glasses, and having done so, Willy will be allowed to go to bed. This sounds simple, but little could be farther from the truth! The game has umpteen screens, each of which roughly corresponds to a “room” in Willy’s mansion, and allowing for walls and stairs you can move between them quite freely, you don’t have to complete one room before moving on to the next (as in MANIC MINER). The rooms are full of moving objects and characters, touching any of which will lose one life. Sometimes things you think are objects, turn out to be fatal. Using the arrow keys for left and right and RETURN to jump to manoeuvre around, leap between platforms and over moving objects. Timing successive leaps to avoid numerous objects moving at differing speeds and judging exactly where to jump from, to land on very narrow platforms becomes more and more complex the further you go in the mansion. Sometimes rooms seem impossible at first and require careful thought, timing and dexterity! If you are completely stuck, ask a Spectrum owner, but beware! There are subtle differences between the LYNX and Spectrum versions, generally that the LYNX is less forgiving and stricter. Some rooms which are absurdly easy on the Spectrom version, require care on the LYNX, personally I think this is a bit of an improvement. There are, hovever, annoying situations where the LYNX just won’t let you survive some things you can get away with on the Spectrum. A final note is the inlay card, it is the Spectrum version. The software protection scheme includes a little card which talks of the Spectrum colour keys—ignore it and use the LYNX colours, they of course work. Oh, and there is at least one bug in the LYNX version, in the wine cellar....This bug is not in the Spectrum version, although the Spectrum bugs seem to be absent from the LYNX. A first clue, you have to jump THROUGH staircases, and you have to be in precisely the right place to do so....numerous other problems are up to you!! VERDICT: Absolutely recommended. Easily a year ahead of any other LYNX game. After a month I still haven’t explored the whole mansion and I haven’t even considered starting to collect any objects yet! Rating 10/10, this should have happened more than a year ago!! PS: When will we see Knight Lore/Atic Atac/ Sabre Wulf....not to mention graphics design and other utility software??? A. Bolton

Thanks ever so much for posting this most interesting reply, Mike – and thanks, too, for your efforts in processing and preserving the software. I love discovering more about obscure old systems like the Lynx and seeing their libraries preserved. The advert is much appreciated too, and certainly answers the question about the JSW conversion being authentic. I'm also intrigued to read the note saying that the 48K version of JSW has 32 rooms. Presumably that means that you needed a 96K or 128K machine to get the full 60-room game? And, does the preserved version contain the full game or the reduced-size 48K version? I haven't yet had time to try finding/setting up a Lynx emulator to investigate further. I see there's a Lynx 48 & 96 core for MiSTer, though it may still be unofficial. Worth trying, though, when I get time. As for emulators, it appears as though the best option for modern computers is MAME, which is a bit of a shame. MAME is great, but it's such overkill when a single small stand-alone emulator is really all you need. It's the proverbial sledgehammer to crack a walnut in cases like this. So is MiSTer, of course, but at least with that you have a dedicated core. There are seemingly only two stand-alone Lynx emulators for modern systems, neither of them in active development and neither of them available natively for Mac (and I'm a Mac user by preference). Anyway, there are options, and that's the main thing. Thanks again for your efforts and for providing further information. By the way, your assumption that the publisher was Tynesoft was very reasonable, as Tynesoft published all the other-platform conversions that Software Projects didn't publish themselves (e.g. the BBC Micro conversions). The Lynx version appears to be unique in that it's published by a third company that's neither Software Projects nor Tynesoft. But that's probably just another sign of the fact that the Lynx platform was so small and had such a tiny market. Maybe it just wasn't worth the effort for those bigger companies. One assumes/hopes that Phoenixx Software would have obtained the necessary permissions at the time, and it's pretty unlikely that they wouldn't, I think, given that the original publishers were around at the time, and – from the advert – this is clearly official stuff rather than being hacker-based activity. The advert is actually pretty interesting for all the other titles it lists; e.g. it confirms the existence of four early Level 9 adventures for the Lynx (I only previously knew of three; Snowball is the fourth.) I must try to find a bit of time to set up an emulated Lynx and try out this JSW…

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.