JianYang

That's not easy. I think I'm starting to understand why I suck so much at games with Mario inspired physics.

Guys, I feel you're holding out on me. Just to be absolutely clear: I don't expect you to justify why you think a game is in a similar category as MM/JSW. I'm not going to judge you, if I disagree. I'm just curious and hoping to discover a few good games. @Spider : Thank you. Good game. I was aware of its existence, but had never given it any significant play time. The bottom half of the main character looks suspiciously familiar.

I thought that too. Then I thought "That's clever - Fest-Vial! I bet Willy will have to collect some potions." But from @UncleWan's reaction it seems to be a typo. But maybe you (unclewan) could consider solving the issue by changing some item graphics to vials, which in my (not so perfect) understanding of the English language are little bottles. Maybe a stupid idea. I don't know. I'm pretty exhausted. I couldn't even make it past the second screen. So my review is just: What I've seen looks really nice.

I'm so glad I clicked this link. I'm usually not a fan of AI images, but this might just be the greatest Miner Willy picture ever. Happy new year!

Just a guess: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Coal_Board

For me the closest match I have found are Meat Boy/Super Meat Boy that are puzzly, platformy and have quite minimal inputs. The next closest thing would be The Lost Vikings. Puzzly, platformy, but far from minimal inputs. On the non-platformer side maybe Hill Climb Racing. I guess it`s mostly the three button inputs and difficulty in getting over obstacles. What are your favourite somewhat-similar-to-MM-or-JSW games?

The promised update. I've made it through. Thank you for the infinite lives. I'd probably still be fighting level 3 or 4 without them. One small criticism in-I think-level 4 "...(again)" the guardians seem to be moving a bit too randomly. Sometimes you get two right behind each other without a chance to jump both at the same time or jump between them and make it out again. I understand that that's true to the source material, but it feels a bit off in a Manic Miner game. It was all still great fun. Possible inspirations for more levels: Adventure, Lemmings, Ant Attack, 3D Monster Maze, (New) Rally X, Tetris, Space Harrier, Sonic I have no ideas how these levels would look, but I would be interested to see your take on them.

Congratulations on that level design. That Pong level looks easy and then I keep dying and dying. Some real Matthew Smith vibe there. The second level (I'm trying to avoid spoilers) looked a bit harder and was a little easier but not by much. On level 3 now. I noticed once that I clearly overlapped with one of the guardians. Could be intentional and/or a nod to the source material. I'm just mentioning it. I'm pretty impressed. Any chance you could make native Android and (GNU-)Linux builds? It works fine with Wine and I might try Winlator, but native versions would be really great. I'll let you know if I make it through the game.

Maybe troll wasn't a great word, but in the cold room there's the shaft with the crumbling floors and next to it there's an empty shaft that looks like it would lead to fall damage/death. But if you have all the items collected you can exit the room through the empty shaft without getting hurt. So he sends you down a wrong path that takes a lot more time and is actually more dangerous than the drop through the empty shaft. In this sense it could be a similar thing of showing the player a maneuverable path that he can choose to collect the item from below or take a much smaller risk and collect it from above. Red herring? False lead? I don't know what to call it, but there's a precedent for something like this. But I agree most likely it's an oversight/design flaw. Looking forward to your Easter egg.

I'm glad we cleared that up. Now your main question is pretty much a philosophical one. I don't have an answer, but I'll give you some thoughts. In my head there are three classes of Manic Miner engines: - Bug-compatible: I don't think they exist in the real world. Unless someone puts in the work to develop a Z80 recompiler, they might never happen. - Bug-fixed: I think most engines are in this category. - Loose recreations: Games that look like MM, but take lots of liberties. I tried but couldn't manage to get stuck in a piece of wall, so I don't think you were going for bug-compatible. For 15.8 levels it feels like a bug-fixed version and then when jumping into the exit I fall to my death. It is surprising. In a way it jumps from one category to another. Do these categories matter to you? They may not even have existed outside of my head until I just wrote them down. Will this change surprise most players? Probably. My gut reaction always seems to be: this should be more like the original. But then I can play the original pretty much on any device with a CPU and a display. In the end as a player I probably get more out of versions that take some liberties. One more question might be: Did Matthew Smith intend people to collect the last item from below? We cannot be certain, but it looks a lot like it. Is it a design bug? Is it a design flaw? Maybe it's supposed to be troll? Until I played the first version that changed this, I never even thought of my strategy to collect the last item from the top as a short cut. Maybe as a final thought: the most extreme love letter to Manic Miner, @DigitalDuck's Manic Miner Redux, went the way of recreating the levels as original as possible and also including a second set of fixed/improved versions. Which might just show how difficult of a question this is. That's a lot of thoughts without even really attempting to answer the question. Maybe this will help: There is no One True Way to do Manic Miner, trust your gut.

I was just trying to give others a little heads up while giving you a compliment in a "Yeah, you got me" kind of fashion while also trying to add a bit of humour. Clearly that didn't work out. Don't worry I like your version.

Just for the record: that was my way of saying "Nice challenge."

Very nice overall. Very naughty what you did to Sixteenth Cavern.

No Linux version? :-(

Almost 9 years ago. Wow! Thank you for digging that out.

First: thank you for the files and the clarification. And as a side note: I noticed that the version of Byron's Lost Levels 128k that I got from jswmm.co.uk did not include the latest build. Just for your information. As I said: when in doubt, include it. There might be a point where I draw the line. In your last example if I don't like the one single screen level I would probably not include it. But I wasn't really trying to establish eternal standards, I was downloading some files to put on my handheld and then thought that maybe someone else might at some point want this too. Putting that process into words was really something I only did after you had asked that question. No problem at all. You would have made my preteen self very happy by mistaking me for Chinese. I was a major Kung Fu nerd back then and everything Chinese was just perfect in my mind. You cracked the code. It's based on that Jian-Yang. Possibly boring story ahead: Back in the days of the Yahoo mailing list you posted some emergency mail that MM was about to lose some vote on WOS to Chuckie Egg. That sounded really important. I couldn't possibly tolerate MM going down in history as only the second best Spectrum game. So I opened a WOS account and had to decide on a name. I thought all the obviously speccy related names would certainly be taken already. And I cannot possibly use anything MM related because then it would be too obvious that I'm just subscribing to help manipulate some vote. I had just watched an episode of Silicon Valley and T.J. Miller screaming "Jian-Yang!" was still fresh in my ears. And then the highscore challenge came and after I had some entries, I subscribed here and to keep my scores I used the same name. And now I'm stuck with it. But I wouldn't even want to change it now. Sorry this whole thing took so much of your time and thank you for taking that time.

Sure, if it's no bother for you. Does that mean "no problem" or "no, that's not okay?" It doesn't look like there's a lot of interest, but if sometime down the line someone would want this archive, would you object? For me it's quite simple: Single screen levels -> Manic Miner Connected screens -> Jet Set Willy When in doubt, include it. But I understand that these are my personal criteria and not everyone will agree. I honestly have no idea what you're talking about. My last JSW related project was to finally play through the entire game with a lot of help from @RuffledBricks' guides. Thank you, Bricks! I completed that several years ago. Other than that I'm much more of a MM than JSW person. So either you're confusing me with someone else or maybe I have foolishly made some comment that sounded like I'm working on something big? In short: I don't have any JSW related projects going on.

I would say "welcome" but it seems you've been around here for more than three years. Spider is definitely an improvement over Mr. Sugarmountain. Love your stuff. Happy Christmas!

While everyone is worshipping Jesus, Santa or Donald Duck, I decided to work on the memory card in my emulation handheld. I wanted (among many other things) all the Speccy versions of Manic Miner in one directory. So I went to JSWCentral grabbed them all and started renaming them. This took quite a lot of time and I started wondering why there isn't a zip-file with all the versions available on JSWC. So since I've pretty much already made it, would there be legal or ethical problems with publishing such a thing? Would @jetsetdanny appreciate me sending him a zip like that? Did I miss any versions or get some of the years wrong? Here's the list as I have it right now: 1983-Manic Miner (Bug Byte).tzx 1983-Manic Miner (Software Projects).tzx 1985-La miniera 2 (Load 'n' Run [IT], 1985).tzx 1985-Manic Miner 2.tzx 1985-Manic Miner No. 2.tzx 1986-Winer Milly.tzx 1996-Manic Miner III - Tales from a Parallel Universe.tzx 1997-Manic Miner 4 (Original Edition).tzx 1998-Manic Miner 5 - Los peligros del LSD.tzx 1998-Manic Miner 7.tzx 1998-Manic Miner - The Buddha of Suburbia (Original Edition).tzx 1999-Eugene - Lord of the Bathroom.tzx 2000-Manic Miner - 2000.tzx 2000-Manic Miner - The Hobbit (Easy Version).tzx 2000-Manic Miner - The Hobbit (Hard Version).tzx 2002-Manic Miner - comp.sys.sinclair.tzx 2003-Ma Jolie (Original Edition).tzx 2003-Ma Jolite (Original Edition).tzx 2003-Manic Miner 4 - Special Edition.tzx 2003-Manic Miner - The Buddha of Suburbia - Special Edition.tzx 2003-ZX81 Manic Miner.tzx 2004-Manic Miner - Jet Set Willy - Vol. 1.tzx 2004-Manic Miner - Jet Set Willy - Vol. 2.tzx 2004-Manic Miner - Jet Set Willy - Vol. 3.tzx 2004-Manic Miner - Neighbours - Allana Truman (Easy version).tzx 2004-Manic Miner - Neighbours - Allana Truman (Standard version).tzx 2005-Manic Scribbler.tzx 2006-Ma Jolie - Special Edition 2006.tzx 2006-Ma Jolite - Special Edition 2006.tzx 2009-Ma Jolie - Special Edition 2009.tzx 2009-Ma Jolite - Special Edition 2009.tzx 2015-Jet Set Luis.tzx 2016-A Manic Minor's 80's Christmas Shopping Trip.tzx 2018-Manic Miner - Back to the Mine.tzx 2018-Manic Miner - Norman Sword's version.tzx 2018-Manic Mixup.tzx 2018-Thoroughly Modern Willy.tzx 2020-Manic 40 Miner V6c6.tzx 2020-Manic Panic 1.5.tzx 2021-Manic-4-Noobs (M4N).tzx 2021-MANIC-minor (M-m).tzx 2023-Manic Miner 40th Anniversary Tribute (MM40th).tzx 2023-Manic Person (Human Version).tzx 2023-Manic Person (Inhuman Version).tzx 2024-Manic Miner - Deeper and Down (v. 1.2).tzx 2024-Manic Miner - The Deeper Caverns 48K.tzx 2024-Manic Miner - The Lost Levels 128K (v. 1.2).tzx 2024-Manic Miner - The Lost Levels DS (v. 1.1).tzx 2024-Manic Miner - The Lost Levels (v. 1.1).tzx Since many MM games were developed over several years, I just went with the year of the earliest release.

I see. Both titles have something going for them. "Invisible Willy" makes it seem closer to the original, while "Willy the Invisible" acknowledges the connection while also being different. Don't take my word for it. I'm a Mof so your English is probably much better than mine.

Beautiful idea and quite a challenge. What's the problem here? Is there anything missing from Norman's code that makes it incompletable? I'm lacking the JSW skills to find out myself. Is it a question of giving everyone the right credit? Or an appropriate name for this? How about "The Invisible Man 2 - A Norman Sword Hack inspired by a Lee Prince idea of Jet Set Willy by Matthew Smith"? Or something slightly less awkward?

The superstar solution would be to give the game an "enable bug compatibility" option. I'm not sure what platform you're talking about. On a speccy 48k that would probably require wizard levels of programming on a more modern platform it would still be hard. Just throwing that out in case it wasn't obvious.

Thank you. You're probably right. The sites involved seem to have disappeared. And I cannot find anything that supports an official release. I was probably just naive thinking that a source code release implies that it's official.

@Woof Could you maybe have a look at this three year old thread? You might have some insights.

If you don't need the sexy case, you could just get a Mister FPGA (or clone). Runs the original recompiled NEXT sources, can emulate a lot of other machines and is cheaper.