MtM

Ah of course, makes sense, I remember the original game does not use real-time.
 
 

I have come across a very interesting article, which discusses copy protection in Jet Set Willy in a truly academic manner. It is called 
Copy Protection in Jet Set Willy: developing methodology for retrogame archaeology
and it was written by John Aycock from the Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary, Canada, and by Andrew Reinhard from Archaeogaming.
 
You can read it here. It's amazing  :).

Andy,
 
Was playing your 40th version with 2 hour time limit tonight, on my Next, but it's way less than 2 hours in reality to finish the
game, you get under an hour in reality, am I missing something, or is it the Next? I am using mode 0 vga on the Next so these
are the most accurate timings. Probably me I know!

Andy,
 
Was playing your 40th version with 2 hour time limit tonight, on my Next, but it's way less than 2 hours in reality to finish the
game, you get under an hour in reality, am I missing something, or is it the Next? I am using mode 0 vga on the Next so these
are the most accurate timings. Probably me I know!

Andy,
 
Top work as ever, thank you!

View File JSW - 2024
2024 marked the 40th anniversary of Jet Set Willy. 🏆
Initially I had planned on something a lot more elaborate to celebrate this however for various reasons I decided a standard game with a few simple changes would fit nicely.
 
There is a time limit of two hours game playing time enforced. If Willy runs out of time (at 12:00AM), the game is over! This is indicated with the game freezing and the word 'time' flashing for a few seconds, leaving the player in no doubt what has happened.
There are 150 items to collect. Care was taken to place these mostly sensibly without detracting from the original game feeling. Also, some item shapes per room have changed, the main reason being at least one item shape looks like two bottles, so if and when Willy collects one of these it will count as two in his collection.
The main loop was modified (thanks N.S for your guidance) giving a reasonable speed boost during play.
Other changes and small fixes include:
The four original bug fixes were applied with the change of not having an invisible item in The Hall.
The rope top height was altered to prevent Willy leaving via the top of the room when he is not intended to.
Aborting the game displays the Game Over page before returning to the title screen.
The pause bug was remedied by preventing the game auto-pausing
By default on starting a new game, the in-game tune is switched off. Enabling it will be respected so that starting a new game will remember the players choice.
The status area was altered slightly, namely the room descriptor was moved down one row, room names were centred and the lives remaining were moved along one block.
The usual text flicker back to 000 objects / time on losing a life or entering a room was altered to prevent this being so visible.
Some internal changes to sprite location, mainly concatenating them hence no gaps between.
Title screen tune changed a little bit (in-game music used) and in-game music from re-release version (MM in game tune)
There is one additional room that is accessible but its not necessary to visit it. This was done as a way of avoiding a 'teleport' effect , the alternative as seen in the 2015 bug fixed version required some earth tiles adding which I wanted to avoid.
 
Lastly, it is quite possible within the time limit to complete the game. I have played a few times and averaged around 10 to 15 minutes game time remaining without really rushing around.
 
I hope my small celebratory 2024 JSW version is welcomed!
Submitter Spider Submitted 12/12/2024 Category JSWMM Releases  

You´re right, that´s exactly what you´ll have to do! 🙂 You´ll have to hide in the woods. Drunken men can be dangerous!
Are there any Willy games where you will have to hide like this? In some (non-Willy) games hiding is a part of the game.
This is very easy compared to The Banyan tree in JSW where you´ll need to do a similar action to pass few guardians in a row. 🙂 
I´ll encourage you to practise to see more. 🙂 
That escalator is just yellow painted lines on the asphalt. 😉 A tip: first observe what the guardians are doing and in what order. You can use the same tip in lot of games. 🙂 
Or received something, what may not belong to you, Mr Badiels? 😄
Zoids. 🙂 Their "built-in" SAVE feature probably relates to evolution of the robot lifeforms. 🙃 

Thanks for this Norman, it's fascinating how you have continued to code and work on this over such a long period of time, and continue to refine it - long may it continue. A real pity it may never make it to the general public but understand and respect your decision and it is of course your right to do so...
 
A v4 would be good if you ever came up with the time and reasons for doing it ... public release of course 😉

Thanks for this Norman, it's fascinating how you have continued to code and work on this over such a long period of time, and continue to refine it - long may it continue. A real pity it may never make it to the general public but understand and respect your decision and it is of course your right to do so...
 
A v4 would be good if you ever came up with the time and reasons for doing it ... public release of course 😉

I am planning to play, RZX-record and make a video of v. 2 and v. 3 of "Manic Jet Set Willy" in the near future (December).
I understand that v. 3.01 was the last one released.
A kind request to Norman Sword: could you please confirm that no more versions will be forthcoming or let us know if you should happen to have any newer versions and plan to release them (is so, when?).

The last version V3.01 is the last official version.
However I did carry on changing the file and did add a lot more code. As is usual the amount of code change was extensive, whilst what is seen is not a great deal. The purpose of the changes was to write spider a personal version. Note I say a personal spider version and NOT a new version. The last version was V3.01  (the last official version). The spider update is V3.02. --- The updates for the Spider only version stop at midnight December 31st. (if it had been a new version it would have had its version number updated to V4.00) - instead  it is just a variant  of the official release of V3.01 updated to V3.02 - Not for release.
So what did I change.
1) Jet Set Willy was an edit of Manic Miner. Due to the editing Matthew did , the code for movement was changed to allow for stairs. That code change also modified how Willy interacts with Walls. I decided to change my code to remove the bug that Matthew had introduced with his stair collision check routine. The change I wrote only occurs when playing the Manic Miner style caverns. When playing the Jet Set Willy caverns, the bug, Matthew wrote,  is left intact. Remember I am trying to leave the Matthew bugs/quirks intact, so as to not change the game play.
2) The main screen changes, as done in the attract mode, are done by a routine I call the curtain effect. The original code simulated the appearance of closing curtains across a window. That was subsequently modified to do more.
3a) Curtains - The last official version draws curtains from the outside of the screen and draws them inward. The number of curtains can be from 1 to 4, and in any combination of the four directions This gave something like 24 combinations for the curtain effect.
3b) I added code to draw curtains from the middle outward. (in pairs, or four)
3c) I added code to remove the combinations of curtain that to me did not aesthetically look perfect. That was all the combinations that involved 3 curtains.  
3d) I added code to slow down pairs of curtains that by logic revealed the screen faster than single sweep curtains.
3e) I added code to make an SFX on curtain reveals
3f) I wondered if I could add diagonal curtains. The answer was yes and they were added
Each and every addition of code needed me to find other code that I could rewrite to make that code smaller. So whilst the above changes are not large pieces of code. The space for every addition was not available, until other code was modified to increase the available space.
4) I redesigned the credits page. For that I needed more graphics.
4a) I added a graphic to replace the Andy Ford text
4b) I modified the graphic drawing routine to allow changes in the graphic output via the insertion of inline code parameters.
5) I changed the method of changing the game music tempo.
5a) the music tempo now tracks the game speed more accurately.
5b) I removed the static Willies. They now dance all the time. The Music on/off has an icon indicating the sound status. 
5c) I slowed the overall speed of the game down. The slowing down of the overall game speed was to enable the game to play at the original game speed of Jet Set Willy. So MJSW at its slowest speed setting will now play at about the same speed as the original JSW. A side effect of the slowing down is it slows down all speeds. Whilst the fastest speed is still fast, it still has a big delay incorporated into each loop.
5d) I can/could remove the unneeded delay from the game loop introduced by the overall slowing down. Instead I use that extra delay to change the super fast music clicks into a more pleasing blip.
6) When cash is being taken from Willies ready cash for life rejuvenation. It now highlights and flashes the cash when it is depleted to zero.
7) When spider played the game without the sound on. It was obvious that KONG needed to have some SFX's.
7a) When the switch in the KONG room is flipped a compound SFX is played
7b) Followed by a slight delay
7c) followed by an SFX as periodically a piece of the wall barrier is erased
7d) KONG drop SFX and speed was changed.
Eight) I Added some more objects to collect in the JSW part of the game. Just checked MJSW v3.02 now has 132 object in the JSW part of the game. No additions of objects in the Manic Miner part of the game.
8a) the added object (in most cases) are not objects that will take any effort to collect. The added objects on the whole are placed where Willy normally travels.
9) The portals are restricted to 20 known places when played in "fixed by play" or "fixed by room". In order to add more change when playing in the "random by room" or "random by play" versions. I have added an extra 20 portals. 
9b) the random versions now selects 20 portals from a list of 40 portal locations. So the random element has the added variation of not being able to predict which room will have a portal in it.
10) Skylab crash SFX changed
11) The revealing of the final barrel/ Plinth screen (GAME OVER SCREEN) was done in MJSW v3.01 by scrolling the screen upwards. That was replaced by a routine to scroll the screen downwards. And finally for this version even that was replaced by a random reveal routine.
11a) the plinth or Barrel graphic is decided now by which screen/cavern he was in when he met his final demise. So in MM screens he will be placed on a plinth, and for JSW room on a barrel. In V3.01 only the barrel is used.
12) added sound to the congratulations final screen.
13) lots more - just not listed.
Whilst the topics mentioned above have changed and can be seen or heard. The game code has been changed to enable me to add the above changes. So whilst V3.02 started as the code of V3.01 it has a very different look.
On reflection of what I wrote above. I wondered why I added a slow down to the game speed. Just now I have remembered that one of the updates/test pieces of code I wrote was investigating the screen refresh routine. I ended up writing around six or seven differing versions, each using vastly different ways to update the screen. In code changes of this sort, the code has many design criteria it needs to meet. The ultimate code would be a logic change that removes all the code, so it becomes a routine that consumes no memory and runs instantly. That aim in most cases can not be met. In MJSW the code is already suffering from constraints to how much memory it is allowed to use. So in order to add these test routines. I switched off the curtain effect the multiple graphics on the JSW title screen, the animated end game pac man and the bed jump fanfare. With those routines removed I had a few kilobytes of now unused memory.
The screen update code changes were time consuming to write, the differing versions allowed me to investigate which was the most viable to continue with as a means of updating the screen. Each version ran at a different speed. The fastest code version, was also the version that consumed far too much memory. The code I ended up using, was a compromise between speed and size. Once the code was picked for usage. I then needed to scan every routine I had written in the game and investigate how I could shorten that code to enable me to add the new screen update routine. Without going into further detail - I managed to add the new screen update code and re insert all the routines I had originally switched off .... Hence the next decision to slow the game down again. see 5c above. 

Remember V3.01 is the last official version. 

V3.02 is a spider modified revision - meant for spider only, and "I" will not post that version here. 

Ho ho ho! How about a Christmas theme Andy, is it possible to change it to red or something for the Festive season? Some kind of
snow theme even? Not trying to make work for you...

I think with modern emulators that is just a good quality of life thing both snapshots and rollback, the kind of things we would have liked back then but didn't have, incredibly few games had a save feature, more on the C64 with a disk drive. Being able to make snapshots, easily poke, and rollback has given a new lease of life to many games. I would never have been good enough to finish JSW II without saves etc.

I think with modern emulators that is just a good quality of life thing both snapshots and rollback, the kind of things we would have liked back then but didn't have, incredibly few games had a save feature, more on the C64 with a disk drive. Being able to make snapshots, easily poke, and rollback has given a new lease of life to many games. I would never have been good enough to finish JSW II without saves etc.

Ho ho ho! How about a Christmas theme Andy, is it possible to change it to red or something for the Festive season? Some kind of
snow theme even? Not trying to make work for you...

Ho ho ho! How about a Christmas theme Andy, is it possible to change it to red or something for the Festive season? Some kind of
snow theme even? Not trying to make work for you...

Fun(?) fact: if you extend the Bathroom ramp all the way down to the floor, and put a hole in the upper platform directly above the toilet, then during the toilet run Willy will run up the ramp and drop through the hole... But will disappear halfway through the fall... then appear suddenly in the toilet. (ie Without visibly falling through half of the height of the room.)
This is because the code which tests for Willy's coordinates at the end of the toilet run doesn't check which vertical half of the room he is in.

I do too. It was a bit different back then with real hardware. Yes I did have a multiface which could do snapshots however the time taken to save/load was about the same as the whole game if not more (if memory serves, it would take the whole lot of ram, with or without display file) , it was more for editing things for me.
Having said that and its a different topic completely in a way, I do wonder how far we can now get on some games without -any- rollback or otherwise. I did try this with other machines (non ZX) versions with some success. Perhaps a Christmas idea.

Congratulations for such a finding! 😃🙂 
Boulder Dash on Commodore 64 perhaps? There are hundreds (at least) of homemade versions available on internet.
I haven´t checked though when the last ones have been made.

Yes it must happen Andy! Would be great to see it - can never have enough versions of JSW!

I did have a special (sort of) JSW game in the works since perhaps April / May / June this year but had a bitlocker accident and lost the later builds, I do have an earlier build but no notes to go with it.
I had planned on (you've maybe seen on Spectrum Computing a year or so ago) the comparisions between platforms, I had thoughts of doing this with JSW too, only 'officially' released versions as such.
There's still a bit of time 😉 🙂 

Just wondered was there no celebratory thread about JSW being 40 years old this year?
 
I didn't have time to check the forum much a few months ago, just wondered if I missed some
kind of celebration about it?
 
40 years is a long time for any game to have a playable lifetime, I know there are plenty of other
classics from 40 years ago, not sure if there are any that are still being developed using the same
engine etc, JSW maybe unique in that respect? Sure I will be proven wrong!

Another MSX JSW map, this one is quite similar but highlights where the objects are. I noted no wording on the water tiles in Hades, however that might be the map makers decision unless slight variations exist...

I can´t help it, the Sinclair Research is one to blame. Or alcohol.
😄

Thank you for your feedback. 🙂 
Perhaps I should add a warning to my game´s front inlay, "Warning! One game player has reported illness when he played while being drunk. Please stop playing immediately if are drunk and feel any symptoms." 🤭
The backgrounds of Willy games seem to be "empty", not all of them, but some at least, the platforms and walls and items being the only visible things among the guardians, everything else being usually just empty black. I wanted to bring the missing "3D" there, all the missing things, like the mountains, the clouds, all the scenery "behind" the "nearest" platforms. Also, in some rooms you can walk "further" away from the tv screen and back, too.