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That said, I'm reluctant to believe that this behaviour was intentional. When Willy makes contact with a conveyor traveling in the opposite direction (coming from any Y height), is he "supposed" to walk, or stop? The fact that both situations are present in the game, makes me think that only one behaviour is correct. The logical behaviour is that Willy should stop, however the guardians ignore this rule and travel in both directions. We may never know which behaviour is correct/intended.

The new image (K) just makes me question my guesses, and creates more confusion 🤣

Your absolutely right (and Spider) about the platform being on a higher Y level than the conveyor. The other place this can be verified is the Solar Power Generator, jumping right off the platform and onto the conveyor brings willy to a halt, exactly the same as in the Central Cavern.

Sorry to bring this "conveyor" issue up again, but I did notice something weird today. My son was testing my Central Cavern replica, and he jumped back between the plants and traveled right on my conveyor (just like the C64 version). I immediately said "that's not possible!" and was confused, since you can't do this on the ZX version. After double checking the ZX original, you CAN actually travel right on the left side of the green conveyor, if you jump from the platform. However, you cannot travel right on the right side of the conveyor (jumping right between the two plants). This almost brings me to the conclusion that the C64 version is actually working correct, and the inconsistency of the ZX conveyor was a bug? or possibly deliberate by MS? Easier to see what I'm talking about in this image...

My guesses (without any peeking)...

Think you could be right with that. Matthew Smith's game design is just as eccentric as the man himself, and to do things the normal way would be been considered boring for him. Either that, or it just made perfect sense to him, possibly due to his eccentricity. We also know that MS did not like to make things "too easy" 🙂

After implementing my rope, I am still somewhat bewildered as to why Matthew Smith used the control system he used for climbing up/down the rope. The climbing logic used in JSW is... Rope swinging left: left key = climb down / right key = climb up Rope swinging right: left key = climb up / right key = climb down Anyone I know who jumps on a rope for the first time is totally baffled on how to control Willy, as the climbing direction reverses when the swing direction changes. That said, after a while, you do eventually get used to it. I have coded the above method in my game (since it's true to JSW), but I did try a simplified version (left = up, right = down, no matter what swinging direction) and it seemed way more logical. I wonder if there was a valid reason that Matthew Smith programmed it this way. Maybe there IS a reason? or maybe it's just a side-effect of lazy coding? Would love to hear any thoughts on this.

My guesses...

The second one looks more like a "revenge" scenario 😁

More guesses for D...

Good call, did not think of that one!

Interested to see what image is generated for "We must perform a Quirkafleeg" 🤣

That's an excellent point Crem, regarding the speed of room switching. If automated, the Speccy might be able to handle 100's of teleports per second, at which point it all becomes an "impressive blur lasting mere milliseconds" to complete. Like you mentioned, you could limit the teleports-per-second, and then the challenge would be for a human to reproduce it the quickest, using the data that AI provided. However, at that point, could it still be considered a human achievement?, or just replication of something non-human? The debate could go on forever... 🤖 vs 🙂

Yes! you are totally correct, I was referring to JSW. I had no idea there are separate topics for the automated MM and JSW, until you pointed it out. Thanks for catching that, and replicating the query!

Thanks to Norman and CPL for sharing this valuable information. I think I have enough to "give it a go", but will probably end up with a list of questions 😁 When you think about it, Matthew Smith was a clever bugger, working out all this stuff in the early 80's, in Z80 assembler, considering his age. Using tables to store the rope pattern makes total sense, rather than some complex maths formula. I always assumed it used a Sine wave algorithm to generate the swing. The GMS2 code snippets provided by CPL will be super helpful also. I am also a "hobbyist coder" and would never call myself a proper programmer, so I will excuse your messy code 😄

Thanks again, that's good info. I might give the rope a go later on. I checked in an emulator, and the JSW rope is a lot more "flowing" than I remember (almost like a wind is blowing it as it swings), so I'm not terribly sure on how to reproduce that. Is there a simple breakdown on how the rope pixels are generated, to create that wind-flowing/swinging pattern?