Richard Hallas

I've just tried it out briefly in the Playdate Simulator. It's really very good! It comes with two versions of the (Bug-Byte version) game: one with monochrome versions of the original 8x8 character graphics, which look minute even on the small Playdate screen, and a version with new 12x12 graphics that fill the screen width perfectly. The new graphics are nicely done: they look authentic, but pin-sharp and with obviously more detail than the originals. You can choose between the default black on white graphics (which I do actually like; they feel appropriate for a mono LCD screen) or the more authentic-looking white on black, which also looks good (much like the monochrome Dragon version, I suppose!). As for the music, the rendition of the title screen music is good (very reminiscent of the Spectrum original, but a little less honky-tonk and more in tune). As for the in-game music, you can choose from a blippy version (very much like the Spectrum original, though marginally less annoying) or a version with more musical-sounding continuous-tone notes. Both are fine; I think I prefer the slightly modernised new version. Unlike some other conversions, there are no wrong notes! The jumping sound is of a similar nature to the original but uses different pitches, so that seems a little incongruous. As for gameplay: very faithful, but not quite perfect. Collecting keys is more sensitive than in the original (you can easily miss ones that you'd normally expect to catch), and I noticed a difference in behaviour when jumping onto the conveyor at the start of Willy Meets the Alien Kong Beast, which really ought to be fixed for an authentic experience (as it upsets my traditional way of playing this level!). Eugene doesn't flash when you collect the last object in his Lair, and – from what I've seen from the demo on the title screen – there are no sunbeams in the Solar Power Generator. I also didn't see a screen flash for getting an extra life (in fact, I don't think I even received an extra life!) when hitting 5,000 points in The Vat. But these are all very minor shortcomings. For an initial version 1.0.0 product it seems extremely good. A handful of little tweaks might be nice to have, but overall this is a fantastic new version. In a screenshot on the home page, it's clear that the author has other level packs beyond the two he supplies, so it'd be nice to see other packs released for this version. (I'd like a pack with Lee Tonks' game, for example, which mentions me in the name of its final cavern!) Anyway, I'm very favourably impressed with this new version, and it ought to be known about as a further modern conversion that's worth having.

Hi all, I've just stumbled across a new Manic Miner port that was completely unknown to me. As I've seen no mention of it here, I thought you'd all like to know about it. Apologies if you're aware of it and I've just overlooked it myself. Anyway, it's a version for Panic's little Playdate console. There's an emulator for everyone without a physical device. I haven't had chance to try it myself yet (I've literally only just spotted it) but from the screenshots it looks to be a promising monochrome translation of the game. Here it is: https://kounch.itch.io/pd-mm-engine

Hi Danny, In fact, you ARE missing something very significant. There is a new key to press, and given that you haven't tried it yet, you're missing much of the new movement mechanics. Like you, I traditionally use Q, W and Space as my preferred keys (well, right Shift rather than Space on a non-rubber-key Spectrum…), but with this particular version of Manic Miner that's no longer a good idea. You CAN still use those keys, but then the new Sprint button is any one of 1–5, which I find really awkward to press with my left hand in combination with the directions. The keys you should be using with this particular game variant are 6 and 7 for Left and Right, 0 (zero) for Jump and 9 for the new Sprint function. Of course, that corresponds to a Sinclair joystick with Up for Sprint. It's worth looking at the notes on GitHub, as they're quite brief (just summarising the changes), but they do explain clearly what the new features are. NB I'm not advocating for this game as such; I just stumbled across it on YouTube and thought I'd let you know about it here. I continue to prefer Manic Miner in its pure form. But… this new version is an interesting experiment and probably worth spending a bit of time with, just because it's so different from any previous Manic Miner mod. It changes the way the game can be played quite significantly and opens up new routes through the caverns. I must admit that I've only tried playing it once myself, and the new mechanics gave me a bit of trouble, but my overall impression was that it was an interesting new variant rather than being negative about it. It's quite a different take on the game, really, and so adds a certain freshness to it.

Hi all, I just wanted to let you know about something that I spotted today on YouTube. A guy has produced a new version of classic (Bug-Byte) Manic Miner called Manic Miner Sprint, in which he's injected 'physics' so that the game can be played quite differently. Now Willy has a variable jump, can adjust his movement in mid-air, and has a 'sprint' ability that allows him to do long jumps and so on. It's quite an interesting mod, and gives the game a new way to play it. What's especially interesting (if not alarming) is that apparently the coding was mostly done by AI. Anyway, I'll leave it to you all to watch the video and investigate the updated version for yourselves. I found out about Manic Miner Sprint by stumbling across this YouTube video: https://youtu.be/gxxNgZgd88I The code repository for the patch, along with release notes, is on Github: https://github.com/sharopolis/manic-miner-sprint And since no downloadable .tap file of the patched game is supplied, I'm saving you all the bother of creating it by attaching the copy I made to this post. The patched game appears to have lost access to the 6031769 cheat (unless it's been changed, but there's no mention of that). But given the changes, and that infinite lives is standard in this version, it's not terribly important. Manic Miner Sprint [Sharopolis 2026].tap

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.