JohnElliott

I get to see people studying my work. And, tbh, I'm amazed the details of the cheat mode haven't been common knowledge for years, considering how long JSW128's been out there.

I just found this thread. How amusing!

Thanks for this (sad) news, John!

 

Apart from the messages, photos are worth saving, too. IIRC, there are some of rooms from unfinished projects - games which were never released and whose files have not been available publicly. These pictures are all that is left of them in public, I believe.

I've managed to download all the pictures (and the messages, though in a JSON format that isn't particularly clear to read). I've also leeched the 'manicminerandjetsetwilly-nonspectrum' and 'jetsetracing' groups, which are the other two JSW-related groups I was a member of. You can find the results attached to this message.

jetsetracing.zip

manicminerandjetsetwilly.zip

manicminerandjetsetwilly-nonspectrum.zip

Yahoo are shutting down their groups system with effect from December 14th. If anyone wants to try and salvage the 7234 messages on the old MM/JSW group, now would be a good time to start.

There's some discussion of possible archiving tools at r/DataHoarder. I'm currently experimenting with YahooGroups-Archiver under Linux.

Ah yes, I remember - because an opening wall is of arbitrary height it was easier to do it from the top or bottom than from the middle.

Looking at my original source, there's a comment:

;
;When all segments have slid, change cell attributes.
;

which suggests that I intended it to behave as I wrote it.

I was looking at the code which implements opening walls in the JSW64 game engine.

 

The way the existing code works, the pixel-rows disappear from top to bottom, and then the attributes of the blocks are turned from Earth to Air.  However, if you have a opening wall which is several blocks high, none of the blocks get turned to Air until the whole wall has had its pixels cleared.  So you can temporarily have an INKless wall, several blocks high, before the whole lot turns to air.

 

Having scrutinised the pertinent code, and thinking out loud, I wonder if the original intention was for each block in turn (from the top one down) to turn to Air as the eight pixel-rows of each are cleared.  A simple single POKE can be used to achieve this - and it involves reversing the conditionality of a relative jump (so a simple mistake by John Elliott when writing the code might explain the way the feature ended up, if my hunch is right that they were intended to disappear one-by-one).

IIRC, the opening-wall code is pretty much lifted from the Kong Beast rooms in Manic Miner, so that's the best place to start looking to see what the intended behaviour is.

I've added these examples to the Trivia page for JSW on TV Tropes.

However, I've just had a look in JSWED, in the Game tab, and it looks like both of these boxes (as well as *all* of the other ones *except* for "Black Willy") *cannot* be either ticked or unticked - they are filled with blue, sort of. I'm not quite sure how to interpret this...

 

It means that at least one byte in a location touched by the patch is neither the original one from JSW, nor the modified one from the patch. So JSWED cannot safely apply or deapply the patch.

Out of interest John, how did the 'Old' adjacent ropes patch work? (Or not, as the case may be!?)

The original one only fixed up the IX+9 references, not the IX+11 ones.

From the start of the source file:

; Adjacent Ropes patch (second try)
;
; Change all IX+9 references to IX+6
; Change all IX+11 (bit 0) references to IX+0 (bit 5)
;

It could be a rope, certainly. I do have the 'adjacent ropes patch' in place. It even occured to me that *it* could be using this space to write data to (instead of the buffer at 81..).

 

In any case, this area is now 'too suspicious' for me to place any code...

Not guilty, yerhonner. The adjacent ropes patch doesn't use any of this space.

Andrew Broad used to maintain such a list. Here's a copy archived from when it was hosted on GeoCities: http://www.oocities.org/andrewbroad/spectrum/willy/list.html

The Yahoo group is https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/manicminerandjetsetwilly/info