JianYang

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.

Nice. Merry Christmas to you, too.

Thank you. Rota is running on my device. That's why I assumed it would be possible. It seems that Godot games on ARM use a special runtime named FRT: https://github.com/efornara/frt/ Now FRT hasn't been updated in 2 years. So it's far from a safe bet that it's going to work. I would still like to try though.

Hello @DigitalDuck, I recently bought myself a handheld game console and I would really love to play MMR on it. Would it be possible to make a build for ARM-Linux? Specifically Rockchip RK3326? Or probably better, but maybe a bit much to ask, open up the source code, so I could try myself? Whatever you decide thank you for reading and again thank you for making this fantastic game.

Exactly. I do occasionally play Manic Panic, but I have to be in an almost masochistic mood to do that. And in regular Manic Miner there is a certain amount of boredom when you have to walk from one end of the screen to the other. I love both of these games, but the speeds are really at somewhat annoying extremes. Your version is just right. Not boring in the easy levels and just a bit more challenging in the harder ones.

This might just be my personal sweet spot of Manic Miner speed. Thumbs up.

Good points. There are several options: - Put all the SAM-levels in one file (we already have that) and all the non-SAM-levels in another - Put all levels in one file but remove some items - Put almost all levels in one file and remove the worst ones - Fix the engine to allow for more items The last one would probably be the gold standard, but right now I don't see it happening. All the other cases are aesthetic trade-offs. In any case nothing will be lost unless Bayron goes crazy and deletes all his work so far. We just have to load different versions of the game. I guess I favour to remove some levels because there are some levels that I think don't belong in a Manic Miner game (The two Twilight Zone Levels from the SAM and In a Deep Dark Hole(?) from the Oric come immediately to mind) and feel more like Nintendo/Mario levels. In the end it's an artistic decision and the artist is Bayron. I trust that Bayron can find the 10% good ideas between the 90% nonsense that I suggest. And I appreciate you supporting him/her in the process.

Then maybe it's not worth it? For most of us loading times are now less than one second. Compromising quality for this minor convenience doesn't sound too good to me. Maybe just assemble the best levels that together stay under 256 items?

So JSW64 supports extra lives? Do you think there could be a better way to grant lives instead of just giving the player plenty at the start?

I've just made it for the first time past Son of Kong Beast in Deeper and Down and I see you were way ahead of me. Great job!

Some ideas: Why not combine all the LL and SAM levels into one big game? Since there are no points anymore, maybe put an extra item next to the Kong beast switches to give some incentive to the player. Maybe increase the number of initial lives as there are no extra lives anymore.

Not really a JSW game by any purist's standards, but it's fun. https://sloanysoft.itch.io/willie Review (not mine):

Probably more in the "loosely based on"-category. Based on a quick image search.

A very enthusiastic review.

I never knew about that one. I'll take it. Thank you.

Could this be an option then? I would really love a setting that has all the original behaviour. Not that it's a big deal, but out of principle I like my Manic Miner to behave exactly like 1983 Bug Byte Manic Miner. Maybe at the very bottom of your todo list? I would be even more grateful than I am now.

These work all fine on original settings. There is one weird behaviour though: When moving against a wall in The Maze Willy will get stuck at the bottom until you release the direction key. Hard to explain. I hope the screenshot helps. This could be completely consistent with Speccy physics though. I don't think I've ever encountered an arrangement like this in a Spectrum MM game. I don't see why these couldn't be levels 81-88 in Redux Long. But that's no complaint. I'm fine with it either way. Tried it, played it, finished it, works fine. Of the three versions I tried, this actually was the easiest but I guess it's just because I tried it last and had a lot of training with the others before.

If you're asking what sprite in the game it's supposed to be: it's that weird red thing in The Freezer. Four balls at the ends of a cross rotating around each other. If you're asking what real life item it represents: I have no idea. Could be a molecule or a space ship or some kind of toy...? Your Jell-o (or whatever the British equivalent is) seems to fit better in a freezer. I did not really understand what your fix was supposed to be, but I was pretty sure that my solution made it easier than yours would. I'll try your fix next. And your text based level format: easiest level editing I've ever experienced. Big thumbs up! Edit: I played through all 79 other levels in Redux Long. I could finish them all.

About the level: IMO the point of that level is that it has two items that are really hard to collect. If you now make both items easy to collect, I'm not sure if there is a point in keeping that level. There seem to be several good levels that are not yet used in the level set. Just my thoughts. Feel free to ignore them. Edit: Forget the idiocy above. I just moved the item up and removed the rightmost spike and still died 29(!) times before getting through the level. That's far from trivial. On another note. I finally read this thread. You mentioned somewhere something about wanting speccyfied versions of the SAM sprites. I tried my hands at two of them (The Office, The Freezer) If you're interested I might make a few more. If not, I don't see myself as artist or designer, so you can just say no without hurting my feelings.