DigitalDuck

Jet Set Willy "WRITETYPER" TAS has now been published. This doesn't quite match the WRITETYPER runs by myself and RuffledBricks as those start with the cheat already enabled; TAS timing typically starts from the moment you turn the computer on, so the loading, copy protection, and cheat entry are all included in the time shown. Total gameplay time is 1:13.910

We've previously done a lot of research on emulator timing for speedrun fairness purposes. BizHawk, Fuse, SpecEmu, Spectaculator, Spud, and ZX Spectrum 4 all run at the same speed as the original hardware. ASpectrum, EightyOne, kjspeccy, Speccy, and Z80 Stealth all run at different speeds from the original hardware. There were others we couldn't test for various reasons.

It's the character 福 (fu), which is usually translated as "good luck" or "good fortune", you'll find it on nearly every Chinese New Year decoration.

I don't think Godot allows for porting to ARM-Linux - at least, not last I checked. I would release the source but it's mid-rework and I've had basically zero time to work on anything substantial in the last year; it's definitely planned down the line though.

It seems pretty faithful to me, you've done a great job.

The corrupted guardians can cause corruptions themselves, but in an unpoked game Willy would just instantly die on entering those rooms preventing the enemies from corrupting the game further. The cheat POKEs in the video I saw were to prevent deaths from guardians, allowing them to cause further corruption.

The effects aren't unpredictable and aren't different every time you play - the arrow's trajectory is consistent and writes to the same bytes every time. To be precise, it corrupts the flying bird, UFO, Esmerelda, giant head, skull, sunflower, and Andre enemies, and any room those enemies can be found in result in the guardians being misplaced and (depending on the room) embedded into walls (which automatically kills Willy on room entry). None of those enemies can be found in First Landing, The Banyan Tree, or Conservatory Roof, the rooms that would need changes in order to make completion possible. It's possible to complete Jet Set Willy without fixing the Attic bug, though - you can apply the other three POKEs (42183,11; 56876,4; and 60231,0), play the game as normal making sure to only climb the East Wall and get the items in Priests' Hole and Dr Jones and head into the Attic once you have all of the other items. From the Attic, you can go Under the Roof -> Conservatory Roof -> Orangery -> Swimming Pool -> Banyan Tree (left to right - not easy!) -> The Nightmare Room -> First Landing -> Top Landing -> Master Bedroom and complete the game. You can't complete it twice though, because the rooms with those enemies in don't become accessible again even after beating the game.

Manic Miner's (maybe) the first to have in-game music on the Spectrum, but obviously there are a fair few arcade games that did it earlier; while I suspect everyone here is aware of that I do see it often claimed as though it's the first game ever to do it on any platform, when it clearly wasn't. Rally X is probably the best example of an arcade game doing it earlier: I can certainly believe it was the first game on the Spectrum to have in-game music though - it was fairly early on in the Spectrum's lifespan and music in games wasn't as ubiquitous at the time. The part of the claim I doubt is the "thought to be impossible" part - I'm pretty sure the music in Space Invaders is done exactly the same way as Manic Miner does it, and as much as Matthew Smith did a great job with the game design he wasn't the most amazing programmer in the world, at least not at the age of 17, and plenty of others would surely know it to be possible. I imagine most simply chose a higher framerate over trying to have something somewhat resembling music playing; after all, if you want in-game music you have a tape player attached - just play it yourself. As for the "plays continuously" comment, I suspect it means as opposed to something like Virtua Racing, where short jingles play at checkpoints but leaves periods without music, or Road Blasters, where the music only comes in towards the end of each level. I doubt it's claiming the air countdown doesn't count and has simply confused the two games.

It should just be as simple as that. Are you in 48K BASIC and not using the keyword (EXTEND mode, symbol shift+3)?

I was thinking about this overnight and I realised that if you're using MERGE then LINE won't work because MERGE ignores it.

It can happen without POKEs too. Memory gets shifted around when loading and/or merging and it's usually fine as long as you're not relying on the program execution continuing from where it was afterwards; as I said, if you save it with LINE xxxx you force it to jump to somewhere else and avoid this issue.

G - No room for line is specifically for when adding a line via the BASIC interpreter, R - Tape loading error is correct for errors that occur during tape loading (or verification). C - Nonsense in BASIC suggests that the code is being changed while running; if you're loading a BASIC program in two parts then each part should be saved with LINE xxxx and jump to the next loader in sequence; trying to continue the existing program when it's changed is going to be unreliable at best.

Manic Miner "maximum score" TAS has just been published to TASVideos. I originally submitted it as "maximum score, no deaths" as it's possible to score infinitely high otherwise, but I'm not in charge of the final naming. Total gameplay time is 2:17:43.

If it helps, this is using the original game, not the highscore challenge version; I just put it here since it's highscore-related. Finding the maximum total score (without dying) was an interesting challenge in itself. On top of the "improvements" I shared before (all of which are also in this run) I managed to score 1863 points in The Vat; unfortunately it wasn't feasible to do this and also reach the maximum total score in the same run due to the life count.

I'm still writing the notes for the TASVideos submission but I thought it'd be fun to post this version in the meantime. Without dying, the maximum score you can reach is 356359. It takes more than two and a quarter hours, and nine and a half loops. The main score barrier pretends to be Skylab Landing Bay, but even if you lose points to be able to clear that one on the ninth loop then Return of the Alien Kong Beast blocks you. So this doesn't get the maximum score on every loop (only the first), and deliberately loses score in the Kong Beast and Solar Power Generator levels in order to start Return of the Alien Kong Beast with the maximum 349899 points that it's completable with; not doing this means the game ends earlier and with less score.

Unfortunately publishing on Mac is such a hassle when you're not on a Mac; you have to download three separate programs, register for an Apple Developer ID Certificate, go through a few dozen steps signing and notarising the app, and then have no idea at the end of it whether it'll even run or not. Needless to say it's not something I want to go through too often...

This is very similar to the format I used for Manic Miner Redux: Miner Willy meets the Kong Beast Spectrum @ x a x @b @ @ @ @ @ @ @ + cc@ --@ @ @ @ @ @ @ @--- ------ @-- @ @ + @ ---- -@ @ --- @ - @ @ + --- @ @ @ @----- @ @- --- @ ----@ @ -- d @ @ -- d ----- @ @ >>>@ @-- + @ @ @ @ z @ @------------------------------@ red 0000 blank black - 0001 floor b.red = 0002 crumble red @ 0003 wall b.yellow b.red > 0704 rconvey b.green z 0008 nasty green x 0709 nasty cyan + 0710 item b.magenta a 0711 switch yellow black a>e d>f hg1xright=18 b 0711 switch yellow black b>g c>h kn0state=1 score=2500 c 0001 floor b.red d 0003 wall b.yellow b.red e 1111 floor yellow f 0000 blank black g 1111 floor yellow h 0000 blank black 0000 willy 2 13 0 0 white 0708 hguard 9 13 1 9 -2 b.green 0708 hguard 11 11 11 15 1 b.magenta 0708 hguard 18 7 18 21 2 cyan 0716 kong 15 0 0 12 4 b.green 0724 portal 15 13 yellow blue I guess it's just natural to want a text-based implementation.

Welcome to the forum and good to see more people remaking the game - I think it'll probably live forever. As for the quoted part, the short answer is "yes". Willy's sprite is always two cells wide, even when every single "ON" pixel sits within a single cell width.

I like what you're doing with the levels graphically - it's definitely a lot more effort than I put into it when porting them to Redux (a PC remake; in general I didn't create or use graphics that weren't in the Spectrum games). I notice you've also made the same change to Cheese-Plant that I did (moving the key out of the corner so it can be collected). We did have a big discussion over how to handle The Pink People Eaters with the original physics, as the way it is in the SAM Coupe relies on being able to stand half on solid ground and half on a nasty without death, which isn't possible in the original game. I have it implemented like this now: Naturally other parts of this will be different in your implementation, but it's something to consider. It looks great so far and I'd definitely be interested in stealing borrowing your sprite work when I work on this side of things again.

Making something run more efficiently doesn't have to mean speeding it up - it can be used to make the game run at a smooth speed (syncing to display refresh and counting frames) instead of speeding up when there are less enemies and slowing down when there are more, or add other more complex elements to the game. Personally I think somewhere between original Manic Miner's Central Cavern with music off (about 12fps) and the GBA version (20fps) is a good speed, which is why I set the default speed to 15fps in Redux.

Just for fun: if you collect the bottom item in Skylab Landing Bay while you're on 33 lives and *99xx points, you're killed by the extra life you're awarded for collecting the item. MM-extralife_VP8.webm

With the life sprite in its first position, you can also get through the corner of the new platform and land on the small platform underneath it. This jump stops being possible at 37 lives.

So I have a couple of corrections to this, namely that I'd missed some things that reduce the life count before some levels become incompletable: Eugene's Lair - at 39 lives, the platform with the black toilet is completely overshadowed by the garbage platform. Unfortunately it's now one cell too high to safely drop down from, and there's no other way down without falling too far. Return of the Alien Kong Beast - at 37 lives, all ways back down are blocked, and again the only way to get down is to fall too far. Attack of the Mutant Telephones - while it's possible to go from top to bottom by jumping through the top of the screen, the platform in the middle becomes an island once you reach 42 lives and there's no way to get up or down from it. Interesting. I'll post about it in that thread if I decide to experiment with that, but it's definitely unique for JSW-style games.

Yes, it's both the playing area and the buffer that's overwritten. When drawing a sprite it adds 256 to the memory address to go to the next pixel row, but naturally the screen attributes follow directly after the screen pixels so they're being drawn to. Even in the most extreme scenario lives are only drawn to pages 80-95 (memory addresses 0x5000 to 0x5FFF) which contain the lower third pixel data for the screen, attribute data for the screen, and the attribute buffers. I'm not sure where the stack is stored, but I don't think it's being overwritten here.

Absolutely - unfortunately this scenario doesn't seem to exist in the vanilla game, but with the right sprites and colours you could have a situation where it cycles between floor, wall, air, and nasty (or the four elements, water, earth, air, and fire), and require the Willy life sprite to be in a certain state to make the level passable (perhaps even requiring floor at some points, air at others, and wall at yet others, so you have to "edit" the level as you play).