JianYang

Yay!

You are absolutely right. After reading your comment I finally had the brilliant idea to read the documentation, and: With that information I was able to reach Abandoned Uranium Workings. I guess if I were stranded on a lonely island with only an Apple II and this game I would probably get used to it. Until that happens I feel I'm done with this version.

Update: I looked through my downloads and found an emulator called linapple. That worked right away. Short review: If you thought the music in the Spectrum version was annoying, you have to listen to the Apple version. The game randomly changes speed and keys get randomly stuck. This might be a problem with the emulation. And even when the keyboard for a few seconds behaves like it should the distortion is bad enough to make it virtually unplayable. All of this together is so bad that I couldn't make it through Central Cavern and I don't really feel like I want to keep trying. It's a technical accomplishment that deserves applause, but even if the speed changes and keyboard problems are all the emulator's fault, I don't think this version of MM would have convinced me of the greatness that is Manic Miner.

I expressed myself poorly. It's not that I have an a2 emulator that works fine and I just cannot get this game to work. It's that I have a vague memory of at some point, after reading Hackers for the 100th time, running Mystery House in an emulator successfully. The only a2 emulator I can find on my system is kegs and I can start it, I see that the virtual Mystery House disk is still there, but I have no idea how to load the game. All I see is the Apple ROM monitor program, and I have no idea how to load a disk from there. Maybe that's how it's supposed to be and I just don't know how to proceed from there. Maybe I succeeded with another emulator that I cannot find right now. It's certainly not the lack of a disk image, because a) it's here: https://github.com/StewBC/mminer-apple2/releases/tag/V1.0 and b) I'm not even at that stage, because I gave up after I couldn't repeat my success of running Mystery House. My memories of trying to get any emulation with MESS to work pretty much match yours. I hope you have more luck than I had.

I tried. I have a working (I think) Apple II emulator on my machine, but I only get into some weird monitor program and I have no idea how to continue from there.

https://github.com/StewBC/mminer-apple2 This seems to have been around for almost a year, but I couldn't find any mention in this forum.

@RuffledBricks So I've finally watched it. This is pure zen. How did you even get the idea to try this?

Could this just be the classic keyboard jamming? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-Key_Rollover#Key_jamming_and_ghosting

I deserve that. @Norman Sword Great work! What tools and libraries did you use to make Manic Panic? Or is that a secret? I once started something similar using z88dk, sp1 and zx7, but I panicked (how appropriate) when it came to deciding on the level format and postponed it indefinitely. That means I designed a status bar ripped some tile graphics from MM managed to display them and then gave up. Thank you for making my dreams come true and maybe when I try again when I'm less tired I might actually be able to handle the speed.