Sendy The Endless

Would creating a fixed pause of a second or two be possible using a null loop? (I think that's what it's called, in Basic it would be an empty for...next loop) I actually quite like the Softricks version of the JSW engine in which the screen flashes red and pauses for a moment. Perhaps that code could be ported into, for example, my next game, Strangel 2?

Have at it! Thanks to Daniel for help with polishing up the code and the readme file, amongst other things (which are all detailed in the readme file).

View File Manic Person My first Manic Miner level-set, created long ago alongside Jet Set Willy: Role Reversal. 20 reasonable and 20 unreasonable difficulty caverns over two files. Submitter Sendy The Endless Submitted 10/07/2023 Category Manic Miner [Remakes]  

Hi MtM, yes for me the SID is what got me into synthesizer music, electro funk, etc. When I learned synthesis Rob Hubbard was one of the first guys I checked out, since he was basically the master of my childhood! In particular I studied his instruments, which is how I learned things like waveform switching (such as switching between triangle and noise to make the classic C64 "sneeze" snare sound). The cover art is a picture of me, uploaded into a free online C64 art editor: https://mcdraw.xyz/ I have 3 SID tunes on the album: Hear My Cry, Wanderers Dub and Somebody Stop This Crazy Thing. I actually made these on my iPad but the thing stopped working a long time ago. Hear My Cry was actually my first foray into programming for the SID and I'm fairly proud of it : ) Thanks for your interest and response!

Hey, does anyone here like chip music? I just released an album of NES, SID and Beeper music at Bandcamp, you can grab it for free or pay what you can afford/think it's worth! https://sendy.bandcamp.com/album/hear-my-cry I figured I'd post it here as I'm really not a member of many other communities these days and haven't been on the scene in ages. I have some IDM/breakcore music on my bandcamp, too. It's all "pay what you want" so you can download it for free if you promise to show your friends who might like it ; ) I'm also posting oscilloscope deconstructions of my chiptune compositions to my Youtube page, here's a sample: Anyone else on here do music, chiptune or otherwise? Sendy

Apparently Darren Salt made some custom mansions to show off his room editor too. I'd love to see a longplay of these some time, but really to the Internet it's like the Archimedes barely exists...

A complete remake by Darren Salt, I remember hearing about this game back in the 2000s but never being able to find an emulator to run it. Apparently this is the version of the game that introduced the trampoline block-type, came with its own level editor, and I've always been super curious about it. http://www.acorn-gaming.org.uk/index.php3?p=Free/JSW2/index Unfortunately, to this day I can't find much info on the Acorn Archimedes, nor do I see any footage from the game on youtube or anywhere else. Does anybody know anything about this?

I decided to go out to a venue a couple of weeks ago and caught a really nasty headcold lol. Mostly it has passed by now. But yes, Strangel II is more or less finished! I have an item table problem which needs fixing and a list of 10 room issues I've written down during my test playthrough. So it's coming soon : )

Somehow the IRL version is even more nightmarish: Then there's this one which is completely different and looks straight out of a platform game:

Makes me wonder what nightmare inspired the Banyan Tree then. That tree that grows in the conservatory one floor above the kitchens and wastes all your lives when you're a kid 🥵

I agree, it may look like a pink turd, but that stuff is delicious!

Just over half of the rooms have been defined now. Not all are connected to the map, I need to slot them in somewhere appropriate. It's amazing what you can do with just the base features of JSW64.

That was always a big drawback to me with MM... Not hearing that little "kiss" sound when you get an item. There's nothing like throwing yourself onto a pile of items and hearing that noise 10 times in a row : )))

Red sky at night, Strangel's delight!

Just a little update in my chronicles of making this... yesterday I realized I was building the game in the wrong variant of JSW64. Specifically, I was using variant X which has 64 rooms (and a ton of free space in each room), instead of variant V (AKA the best variant ; ) which has 128 rooms but no room for custom sprites in the room definition. So I had to export/import all the rooms, sprites, and specifically the room specific "gimmick sprites", and then import them into the main sprite pages of the variant V engine (V doesn't have enough memory in each room for guardian sprite pages, just enough for a portal graphic or some code). Then of course I had to set up all the guardians again to point to the right sprite pages as per the import. There's a bug in JSWED where batch exporting rooms from variant X to variant V causes every other room to go missing, so I had to export each room manually. I also noticed that all my items were missing in-game, despite appearing in JSWED, but thankfully that was sorted out by simply deleting and re-instancing the items. Currently I have 29 rooms created. Still plenty of space in the sprite memory for more guardians, but those uni-directional guardians really eat into memory... if only there was support for uni-directional guardians that use a blank frame for either their left or right travel, without having to waste this space... it feels so... extravagent lol I've also altered the byte in the FFxx region of memory which tells the skylabs to move 8 to the right after each crash. I've fixed that to zero so I can have droplets at the expense of sacrificing skylabs. Seems like a fair trade to me, although I know there's a way to get both types in one game by hacking the guardian definitions, I'm just not on that level of hacking yet : )

Yeah, it really captures the fever dream of playing the game for the first time, and trying to imagine this new world inside the computer : )

Yes, I'm aiming for dark colours and light backgrounds, but in a few rooms he's regular white flavour ; ) Like this room for example. This ring a bell with any C64 heads? : ))) Real tribute to my childhood here. I used to play Game Maker all the time on the Commode, even though you could only design one screen and the collision detection with platforms was horrendous lol

Thanks, not too difficult to jump over either ; )

More of the castle area

This is definitely Strangel II taking shape... The possibilities to make something just as surreal and strange but more friendly to the player are presenting themselves to me. I'm using JSW64 Variant X, and I was just porting over some of my favourite sprites from my other JSW games and I noticed that there are considerably less sprite sheet pages in JSW64 than in JSW128... That's when I made the discovery of the extra sprite pages in each room's data! There's 18 sprites you can have PER ROOM that don't need to be in any other room; that's enough for two unique bi-directional horizontal guards PLUS a portal graphic with change left over! I knew portals could use these graphics, but SO CAN GUARDIANS! Anything specific to a room, for example, scenery and sprite-based static nasties, cobwebs, slime, etc can go in these room slots, and you can save the main guardian table for the mainstay enemies that will appear more frequently. This also means, if you want to do a uni-directional horizontal enemy, instead of wasting a main sprite page for it, just to have a blank sprite for one direction of travel, you can just copy the sprite you want to uni-direction-ify to this room data sprite screen and make the blanks, leaving the original guardian without a ton of empty space wasting up the sprite bank. Also, what I call "gimmick guardians", like things designed to phase through certain block graphics or otherwise fit into a room for a unique challenge, are perfect for this extra room memory. There's, like, SO much space in each room and you can even make more by playing with the guardian table length... It's taken me a while to get my head around this feature of JSWED, but last night I finally realized the implications for this are big : )

Is pretty good : ) it

👍 All working with the Tower, now! It's difficult, though! 😅

Another room. Trying to go for a mix of spacious and cramped/sprawling rooms.

Another thing UMM brought to light was the idea of conveyance within a game world, and how that can change when working in a new engine (JSW128 vs JSW64 with it's extra blocks in the room layout). In several parts of UMM it's difficult to know which blocks and even sprites will kill you. There are some classic stalactite nasty blocks which are actually safe to move through, some NPCs that you can stand on, some you can walk through, and some you can do neither. The extra blocks aspect of JSW64 mean more creativity, but also remove the process of elimination that takes place in a typical JSW128/48 room, where a fire cell that doesn't look deadly can be deduced simply by it being the only type of cell you haven't touched yet, and hence you know to avoid it. There are several ways to approach this idea of conveyance, but I think the best way is simply to make sure harmful cells LOOK harmful - either spiky, or flashing, or otherwise malformed. The same goes for things in the background, be they sprites or window dressing in the form of blocks... Developing a singular readable style for how you colour- and shape-code is essential when these extra affordances are... afforded to the designer. This brings me 'round to my final point about JSW64 designing - it can be challenging to make sure each block type has it's own unique attributes, whilst also creating a pleasing colour scheme across the whole room. There are a few ways around this - such as inverting the bit-pattern and attributes (reverse pixels, then swap paper and ink colours) - which let you use the same colour pair for two different block types. There's also a patch that Andrew Broad used in his James Bond game - the flash-cancelling patch. This is something I'm considering looking into as a future way of cell-class-colour management in my games going forwards. Then there's the final option for JSW64 colour correction: The MONO patch : ) I'm not sure I could bring myself to use it, but with the right game, I'm sure it'd be very atmospheric, and would allow many blocks to be placed side-by-side to make up more complex visuals without having to worry about color coherency... Finally, I dare suggest some of the negative reactions to UMM could be down to the author over-hyping his own project, using too many superlatives, even in the title (is this the ULTIMATE Manic Miner experience?). Perhaps that got people's goat a bit? Either way I hope Igor makes a comeback. I think Jet Cat Frosya and ZX Heroes are among some of the best looking and playing JSW mods out there, and; certainly, given what's going on in Russia at the moment, I hope he's doing alright and is simply enjoying a hiatus on creating JSW mods! Igor, if you're reading this, let us know you're OK! We miss you!