Richard Hallas

OK, hoping that this hasn't already been covered in some other post that I've missed… Further to all the recent stuff about TonyLobster's amazing work on the BBC version of Manic Miner… A chap calling himself 0xC0DE has adapted TonyLobster's work to produce a brand-new version of Manic Miner for the Acorn Electron! This is actually an amazing achievement, as the Electron wasn't all that powerful a machine, and it was a lot slower than the BBC too. Its memory constraints show up in the fact that this new Manic Miner port uses the minimum amount of screen space it can get away with, and just occupies the bottom half of the available space, in effect. Some screen elements have had to be redistributed because of this (in particular, the Air bar and the score/lives/status line are now at the very top). Nevertheless, this is a really good conversion – just like the new BBC one, really – and could have been a very successful Electron release if issued back in the 1980s. And it's the first time Manic Miner's made it to the Electron, which is quite something. It only took 38 years… Find it here, in both tape and disk versions: Manic Miner for Acorn Electron (2021 release)

Thanks. And as for hosting it in this way – excellent. 🙂 What better place for a copy to live?! Yes, it's a really great improvement, isn't it? Finally, it feels as though the BBC has a decent version of Manic Miner to do the platform justice, rather than the rather clunky reduced-fun effort it was before. It was always quite an interesting version because of the differences in the final two screens, but now it's a good and playable game too. Indeed, it'd be nice if TonyLobster would apply his skills to the BBC versions of the JSW games, as they're very much in the same class as Manic Miner…

Oh… sorry about that; obviously I hadn't realised. He didn't post about the disassembly he made only a couple of weeks ago, so I assumed it would be helpful for me to post again on this same thread. Guess I should have checked first. Apologies for the wasted bandwidth.

There's an interesting follow-up to the release of the BBC Manic Miner disassembly. The same chap who recently disassembled the game – he calls himself TonyLobster – has now put a lot of effort into improving it too. The results are spectacular. Whereas it used to be slower than the Spectrum original and feel really clunky, it's now faster and plays much better. The graphics are now flicker-free. The in-game music, which was worse than on the Spectrum, now sounds good (as befits the BBC's sound chip). The AIR indicator is back to being horizontal, like on the Spectrum, and a split-screen effect is now used to allow it to use the traditional red/green/white colours (usually! – Eugene's Lair is the exception) regardless of the choice of four colours for the playing area above it. It's surprising how this single change makes the whole game feel a lot more colourful, like the Spectrum original. All in all, it's a vast improvement on the original, and now plays really well. It's actually the enjoyable game that it always should have been – shame it wasn't released like this in the first place! TonyLobster's own summary of the improvements (quoting from his StarDot forum post) is as follows: * Fast * Flicker free player movement * Fixes to cavern layouts, graphics, and colours * Better air bar and colours * Fixed the shape of the jump to match the Spectrum * Better collision detection * Better music * 'GAME OVER' added * Master compatible Full details about what's been done are on Github: https://github.com/TobyLobster/ManicMiner2021 Anyway, anyone with an interest in the BBC version is encouraged to download the "NEWMINER.ssd" disk image and give it a go. Prepare to be impressed. Also, the recently discovered cheat mode from the original still works. To recap: • During a game, press PAUSE (DELETE key) • Type A SECRET (including the space); if registered, a sound will play • Press UNPAUSE (COPY key) Now, you can jump directly to any level of the game by pressing F0 to F9 (levels 1 to 10) or Shift-F0 to Shift-F9 (levels 11 to 20). Once enabled, the level-jump cheat remains active for the rest of the session. Very useful for getting to the substantially different final two screens.

Yes – my reaction was a bit exaggerated too, for entertainment value, but… the basic points are correct, I think! 😉 I do agree that the Next group is a shadow of itself. I'm really not at all sure why. It went – all of a sudden – from being extremely active and fascinating to being… just a lot less active than it was. And it happened at a weird time, too, when KS2 was fresh in people's minds and you'd expect there to be a lot more active interest. Perhaps it's a result of a slow-down in development work. Clearly things are still going on behind the scenes, but new features aren't coming thick and fast in the way that they once did, not least because most features have now reached a certain stage of maturity. Just to name one example… back in the early days, I suggested that the Pi0 could be integrated into the audio system and used as a TZX player, and that idea was actually taken up and implemented. It took quite some time, effort and experimentation to get it working properly (and I helped a bit with testing)… but now it's 'there' – finished and working – so there's nothing else to do, really (unless they decided to support PZX files as well). I was under the impression that TRD disk support was also on the way, and I hope it still is… but I've heard nothing about it recently. Maybe it's on the list to do after the next major core update has been issued. I do find it odd that Phoebus announced he'd be issuing a new distribution "within the next day or two" at around Christmas, and we're still waiting for it nearly four months later. But then again, it's not as though it's needed urgently; everything's working fine. Maybe the want to make a big splash with some major upgrades just in time for the launch of the KS2 machines. I do miss the time when the group was a lot more active and interesting, though. It was my main reason for visiting Facebook, and I actually had a lot of fun with it, despite the odd negative aspect. There are indeed some very good people on there, and indeed the community as a whole is very friendly and helpful. Anyway, thanks for your kind words – they're appreciated. Yes, he does make a good point. I personally use Facebook through a web browser on my Mac in the main, but I do sometimes look at it on either iPad or iPhone, and there the dedicated app is definitely to be preferred. Well, on the iPhone anyway. On the iPad it's a blurrier choice.

"My powerful influence"?! 😃 LOL! Well, that's certainly a different take on things, and unusually flattering – if somewhat misplaced! I don't have any influence in the Next community; indeed, I may be a negative influence in some ways. For example, one of the active members of the Next team told me explicitly that I was so tediously long-winded and boring that he always ignored any post with my name on it, because reading it was a waste of his time. Another core team member simply blocked me entirely, so that he could no longer see my posts and I couldn't see his. To be fair, there are other, more central members of the core team who have been a lot more pleasant and who do treat me like a human being… but I'm under no illusion about the level of influence I exert! (And, frankly, why should I have any influence? I've contributed a few minor things, but nothing of any real substance. Having said that, I did offer substantial help at an early stage – help that they could really usefully have taken advantage of – and was completely ignored. But that was up to them…) I do agree about Facebook; as a solution for hosting a discussion forum about something like the Next, it's crap… and I've said so several times. I'm also not really a fan of it in general terms either (and certainly don't trust the actions and motivations of the people behind it…). But unfortunately, regardless of its shortcomings, much of the population clearly loves it and even thinks of it as 'the Internet'. Rants from me aren't going to change that. Moreover, as you mention, there's a perfectly good dedicated forum for the Spectrum Next at the machine's official website, i.e. https://www.specnext.com/forum/, and although some people do use it, the vast majority of users simply ignored it and went to Facebook instead. This wasn't anyone's choice, and presumably if the team had wanted to use Facebook, they wouldn't have provided a dedicated forum in the first place. Anyway, I'm afraid it would need something more momentous than words from me to cause people to abandon Facebook in favour of the official forum. Maybe if all the developer team rebelled against Facebook and said they were only going to participate on the Next forum in future, that might do it. Or, it might have done it a couple of years ago, when a lot more visible, interesting stuff was happening in public (again, as you mention). Now, I think, it's all too late. As for me, probably the best thing I can do is to continue posting my tediously long and boring messages on Facebook in the hopes of scaring people away!

As Ian has just said, he emailed me this question directly a few days ago. I might as well reproduce my response to him here… PS Further to the above, it's also worth noting that there are actually only two phrases in the Alchemist theme (both of them repeated), and although the second phrase sounds faster and more complex than the first, that's only because of the pedal note (the repeated upper note, on the fifth of the scale). Without that pedal note, the two phrases actually go at the same speed and are very similar indeed. So really, it boils down to being a single short and slightly modified extract from BWV565, as far as I'm concerned.

Hi, This is nothing to do with me as such; I merely pass on the information. Someone on the StarDot.org.uk forums has just done a comprehensive disassembly of the BBC Micro version of Manic Miner. It's on GitHub.

I was always under the impression that the revised Amoebatron guardians in Amoebatrons' Revenge were supposed to be bugs out of the Bug-Byte logo. But if so, this use of the logo was complemented by the Software Projects impossible triangle logos in The Warehouse, which is the previous screen. So, Software Projects logos in Room 17, Bug-Byte logos in Room 18. I don't know whether there's any real significance to this (e.g. Software Projects now being 'ahead of Bug-Byte').

That's all true, but I was speaking as an experienced Manic Miner player who does know the layouts very well. Certainly, the mod would provide extra challenge if applied to one of the third party MM games with less familiar (or new to the player) layouts. But as someone who's been playing Manic Miner since 1983, I don't find the lack of normal colour attributes in the standard rooms to be a hindrance at all. Also, don't forget that for players who grew up with the Dragon version of the game, there wasn't actually any colour in that one in the first place! :-)

I really like these mods! Gloomy Cavern restores the difficulty to being the same as the unmodified Manic Miner

Hi Daniel! Thanks for your interesting and thoughtful reply. In fact, we're in complete agreement about most things you say

I've just belatedly noticed this thread, so as one of the people who was there, I thought I'd say a few things from my own perspective, particularly about the competition. Danny is correct that my "Join the Jet-Set!" came second in the competition, after "Maria vs Some Bastards". As for the competition itself, I had very mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I was pleased to have one of my games picked at all; that in itself was a real honour, considering the sheer number of JSW games developed, and also considering that mine is one of the very oldest, having been completed back in 1985. But on the other hand, the way the competition was presented and run was simply not fair on any level. What was the criterion on which the games were supposed to be judged? How they played? How they looked? How much they stretched the JSW engine in terms of quirky exploits or new routines etc.? Having a competition for which one is "best" is actually pretty meaningless. The only criterion that the audience was permitted to judge, really, was how the games looked