DigitalDuck

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.

27 minutes ago, jetsetdanny said:

Thanks for the file, Andy! 🙂 It does run visibly faster than the original.*

* One thing that has always puzzled me is why some people are so excited about speeding MM and JSW up (there have been various attempts to do it, some admittedly very successful), while others complain that these (and many newly created MM/JSW) games are so difficult. It seems to be a contradiction. If you take a difficult game (where manual dexterity is involved) and make it run faster, it will be even more difficult. So anyone who thinks these games are difficult (and they are, *unless* you use Rollback, for example), should be thinking of slowing them down rather than speeding them up. That's what I think would be logical, at least...

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.

5 hours ago, IRF said:

Return of Kong - it looks to me like 36 lives will also create a platform on the left which Willy can't descend past? Because that tricky leftwards jump through the corner of a short floor platform, which you normally have to do from the longish platform just left of centre halfway down the cavern, won't work (you'll pass through the corner of the short platform but then land on the new platform just beneath it?)

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.

On 2/26/2024 at 9:54 AM, DigitalDuck said:

There's a limit to how many lives you can have before each level becomes incompletable (although you can always lose lives until they become completable again).

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.

16 hours ago, jetsetdanny said:

"Terry The Turtle" is the game to try it "the natural way", i.e. without any POKEs.

You start out with 7 lives which are visible on the screen. As you gain extra lives, 4 more become visible as little turtles on the screen, just like the original 7. The next 3 extra lives are not marked in any visible way, and then with the 15th life the leftmost little turtle at the bottom of the screen, symbolising a life, starts to flicker. Then, with the following extra lives, the next turtles at the bottom of the screen start to flicker. When the number of lives exceeds 28, it affects the display of the room names (the letters disappear starting with the leftmost one; the effect is irreversible - even if the number of your lives goes down below 28 again, the affected letters in room names in new rooms you enter are not visible). With even more lives the game is slowed down or it can crash or become unplayable in some other way (e.g. because of 'rogue' cells blocking your way).

As the author of the game, Steve Dixon (Jammajup), explains, "if you are good at these types of games and constantly use the emulator save state you can collect so many lives you can slow down or even crash the game!" Indeed, this is a serious problem and in order to eliminate it, while recording the RZX walkthroughs of the four versions of the game (three of which still need to be improved - please see this thread for details), I deliberately killed Terry many times during each walkthrough, so as not to have more than 28 lives at any point in the game. The elimination of the excessive number of lives had to take place, much as I dislike serial suicides 😉 . However, if someone is interested, you could experiment with the extra lives and the effects their excess produces.
 

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.

1 hour ago, IRF said:

By the way, is there some temporary flickering of these blocks? I have a feeling that there would also be some overwriting of the actual screen attributes, as well as the attribute buffer, causing flickering (which is just a visual glitch not affecting gameplay). The stack may also be overwritten, which could in theory have more serious consequences (like the program crashing!) 

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.

5 minutes ago, IRF said:

So you could envisage a scenario where progress relies on turning the music back on to make a block change from a lethal Fire cell to a 'standonable' floor block! The on/off status of the in-game music being an inherent part of the gameplay would be another novelty!

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).

10 hours ago, IRF said:

Even curiouser - if the item in AUW is collectable (ie. by Willy when he passes through it, not auto-collected as soon as Willy enters, like the glass in JSW's The Swimming Pool), that suggests the glitch is just a visual effect, not affecting the gameplay. (An item embedded in a genuine non-Air block is either uncollectable, or auto-collected if the block happens to have white INK. EDIT: or collectable if it's within a crumbly block but only once that block has been completely crumbled away by Willy standing on it.) Yet in terms of Willy's ability to stand on the errant blocks, it's seemingly more than just a visual artefact and it does affect the gameplay!

Not shown in the video because I just wanted to get something out there quickly, but what's actually drawn on the screen depends on the sprite shown for Willy's lives; as I have the music turned off, it's not cycling. The state I have the sprites paused in is the only state in which items are auto-collected. In all cases at least one of the two blocks drawn is a floor block. I suspect the black cells are actually air tiles, hence the item being collectable; these same black tiles are nasties in Skylab Landing Bay.

10 hours ago, IRF said:

(2) You said that the errant blocks manifested themselves as fire cells in Skylab Landing Bay, making that cavern impassable. But did you try teleporting beyond there (using 6031769), to see what might happen beyond that? If the bonus lives continue to accrue, then new gameplay possibilities might open up (even quicker routes/shortcuts), as the extra blocks continue to build rightwards... Although if they stretch across the whole screen, they might make it impossible to descend a cavern from top to bottom? (Unless of course they manifest as crumbly blocks!?) They might also block progress if they appear as solid wall/earth blocks...or may spice things up if they turn out as (non-animated) conveyor cells! (The exact behaviour depends on the assigned attributes for each block type in each cavern, and whether or not there is a match - floor/water tiles being the default if there's no match.) The errant blocks shouldn't collide with any guardians (since such collisions are pixel-based), but they might conceivably trigger rapid air loss in the Solar cavern when the solar beam passes through them? Finally, what happens when the blocks created by the bonus lives go past the right-hand side of the cavern? Do they start to fill the next character row down, or do they then start to corrupt the pixel buffer? (Now that COULD cause a guardian collision!)

I actually discovered this a while ago with lives POKEs, this was just my first time seeing if it can occur during normal gameplay. You can experiment yourself with POKE 33879,n. After 48 lives, they start being drawn over the level name and air counter instead.

There's a limit to how many lives you can have before each level becomes incompletable (although you can always lose lives until they become completable again). I've split them into three groups:

Early blockers:

Central Cavern - at 39 lives, you cannot jump over the robot without landing on the extended platform, which blocks your fall to below. Interestingly, it becomes possible again at exactly 46 lives only, as this allows you to walk to the right and drop down that way (similar to what the GBA/PC version allows you to do), but at 47 lives that way becomes impassable too.

Miner Willy meets the Kong Beast - at 40 lives, there is no way of getting through the opening after pressing the switch to collect the last banana.

Endorian Forest - at 40 lives, the middle trunk and extended platform seal you in the starting section.

Return of the Alien Kong Beast - 40 lives, same as Miner Willy meets the Kong Beast.

Skylab Landing Bay - at 34 lives, the nasties block a mandatory path.

The Final Barrier - at 46 lives, there is no way of getting out of the top-right area after collecting the keys there.

Standard blockers:

At 47 lives, the "platform" extends covering the entire play area (minus the last two cells, but one of those is always a wall, and Willy can't fit through a gap of one cell). For The Cold Room, The Menagerie, Eugene's Lair, Processing Plant, and The Warehouse, 47 lives is the point at which they can no longer be completed as the entire screen is blocked and cannot be traversed from top to bottom.

No blockers:

These come in two forms: in Abandoned Uranium Workings, Wacky Amoebatrons, The Bank, The Sixteenth Cavern, Amoebatron's Revenge, and Solar Power Generator, you start in the bottom half of the screen and exit at the top. As a result, platforms stretching across the screen don't inhibit progress at all. You do normally need to revisit the bottom half of the screen in Solar Power Generator, but the platform extends to make that unnecessary long before it's made impossible.

The second form is in The Vat, Attack of the Mutant Telephones, and Ore Refinery. While all three of these levels require going from top to bottom to top (or bottom to top to bottom in the case of Ore Refinery), they also have platforms very near to the top of the screen, requiring wall tiles to prevent you from jumping outside of the screen boundaries. These wall tiles are replaced with floor tiles, allowing you to jump through the screen vertically and access the other half of the screen.

All of these levels can be completed regardless of the number of lives you have.

Whether it should be allowed or not is already contentious enough with what I've already shown - I think we can safely say that if cheats are required then it definitely shouldn't count, so anything with extensive corruption is out. I believe this also means that the maximum attainable life count in the game is 38 (Skylabs limiting to 34 plus four extra lives attainable in one loop).

6 minutes ago, IRF said:

Plus the precise workings of the bug may be somewhat predictable. In one cavern during your experiment, an errant extra life auto-collected an item (presumably because the INK in the host character space was rendered in white. But in other circumstances, a non-white INK attribute might get printed over an item, making it uncollectable!?

It seems that it's still collectable when another attribute is printed over an item - this happens in Abandoned Uranium Workings. It also seems that the bug is consistent in what it puts on-screen. My main concern is that it isn't possible the first eight (at minimum) times you complete the cavern, and these are clearly different caverns to those intended due to modified terrain.

5 minutes ago, IRF said:

Wow! Did you actually play far enough without losing lives to gain enough extra lives to spill over onto the playing area, or did you POKE the remaining lives to a high number and start from there?

Anyway, I'm confident now that I won't need to update my forthcoming project again like I did have to do for The Endorian Forest.

I played through, albeit not in real-time (so savestates, rollback etc.) - I'm doing it for a max score run because I think it's interesting to watch the game disintegrate as you play.

It takes about two hours of perfect play to get to this point so I don't recommend it.

In short: earning enough extra lives corrupts the screen, which acts as floor tiles in most caverns and allow routes that aren't normally available.

The following five scores are shown in the video:

Abandoned Uranium Workings - 1856

Miner Willy meets the Kong Beast - 4142

Wacky Amoebatrons - 1377

Attack of the Mutant Telephones - 1750

Ore Refinery - 1884

3 minutes ago, IRF said:

Intriguing... I would say that if it involved the use of some quirky feature of the existing game engine, then it should count. But if you used a POKE of some sort, then it shouldn't.

It doesn't use any POKEs, it's possible in both the original Bug-Byte and Software Projects versions without any modifications.

However, it's not possible in the high score challenge version of the game.

I've managed to complete Abandoned Uranium Workings with 1856 points, but it's in a very non-standard way and probably shouldn't count in the rankings... I'll reveal more when I'm done exploring other levels.

15 hours ago, IRF said:

But then if Willy's first adventure was set on a chain of islands, it wouldn't have been called 'Manic Miner'! It would have been 'Willy the Island Hopper' or something, and he would be wearing a sunhat or visor instead of a miner's helmet.

Sounds like a great idea for another game...

2 hours ago, jetsetdanny said:

However, I also relate to the word "level" being used for any kind of game where passing on to the next screen/game map/part of game map, etc. depends on solving the previous level (which may be a screen/game map/part of game map, etc.) successfully.

This is the definition I was thinking of - although levels needn't specifically be completed in a linear order (for example, most Mario games have a fairly open structure where you choose a level, and completing that level grants access to additional levels) they are self-contained challenges which have a clear definition of "completion".

In the case of Manic Miner, completing a cavern gives you a score bonus based on how quickly you completed the room and then loads the next cavern, refreshing your air and providing a new checkpoint to return to when you die. So each cavern definitely counts as a level.

2 hours ago, jetsetdanny said:

Interestingly, in "Double Miner" I would say that there are 10 levels, but 20 rooms/screens/caverns, because the player needs to solve two rooms/screens/caverns before moving on to the next level.

"Double Miner" is also an interesting test for Ian's definition of a cavern, because each pair of rooms consists of a "non-portal room" and a "portal room". You can move between them freely, but you can only progress to the next level of the game (the word 'level' comes in so handy here!) after collecting all of the items in both rooms, which activates the portal. So are both of these rooms caverns or not? I would only say that individually they are not levels; together each pair of rooms creates a level.

This is an interesting one. I'd definitely say 10 levels and 20 rooms, but I'm not sure if I'd count it as 20, 10, or even 0 caverns (the last being the same way I wouldn't consider the whole of Jet Set Willy as one cavern).

2 hours ago, jetsetdanny said:

Finally, one could also design JSW games that would have 'levels' as defined at the start of this post. A prime example of this would be "Party Willy (JSW128 version)" - you have to collect all of the items in the rooms that are equivalent to the 48K "Party Willy" Part 1 and do the mid-game toilet run to be able to start playing the rooms that are equivalent to the 48K "Party Willy" Part 2. In this sense, the game has two levels (although I wouldn't normally think of them as 'levels', but 'parts', because of the game's name).

My general feeling is that in "Party Willy" you cannot really talk about an increase in difficulty level between the two parts (they are both very difficult). So it's an example of a JSW game that has 'levels', but they're not defined by increased difficulty.

"Jet Set 40-40" is another example of a JSW game that has levels in the sense of having to complete one part of the game to be able to progress to the next part. In this case, the levels are also marked by an increased level of difficulty (the player has to collect four complete sets of items; once the last item of one set has been collected, the items of the next set will appear. The difficulty of the game will increase with each consecutive set of items, as more and more guardians threaten Willy's progress through his mansion and its surroundings).

The C16 version of Jet Set Willy II is split into four parts this way as well - although you can load each part at any time and there's no requirement to complete them (in fact I'm not even sure it's possible to complete most of them). Personally I'd refer to these as levels as well, as they're effectively just larger versions of the Double Miner case, but it would be interesting to know how this was referred to in the manual.

The SAM Coupe version of Manic Miner has three sets of caverns, and the title screen asks you to select a "game"...

I'm thinking Deserted Isle is a cavern after all.

For me the difference is that in Manic Miner, you're not free to exit at any time - you must collect all items and then head to the portal, and after heading to the portal you can't return (unless you complete a full loop of the game). In Jet Set Willy, you can (almost) always exit a room without collecting any items, and return later should you wish to.

I could define a "room" as one screen of the game, such that both Solar Power Generator and Emergency Generator are rooms; but to make a distinction, Solar Power Generator can also be considered a "level", whereas nobody would consider Emergency Generator as a level, for the reasons above. In that sense, a cavern is a room that is also a level.

... is Deserted Isle a cavern?

Manic Miner Redux supports many thousands of rooms.

(What? The original post never mentioned "Spectrum"...)

It'll depend on what programming experience you have already.

1. If you've not done any coding before at all, I definitely wouldn't recommend starting with assembly - follow a Python tutorial (effectively the modern BASIC) and learn the basic concepts before tackling assembly.

2. If you have knowledge of higher-level languages but have never done any assembly, Z80 isn't a bad place to start with that. You could follow the links in 3 and it wouldn't be too difficult. However, I do want to give a special shoutout to MarkeyJester's Motorola 68000 Beginner's Tutorial, as even though it's for a more complex processor it really does break everything down and you can apply the knowledge and concepts to every assembly language out there. I definitely recommend reading it, even if you're not interested in 68k ASM.

3. If you've done assembly before or read MJ's tutorial, or you're just feeling brave, then I'd go with two links. Patai Gergely has a breakdown of the Z80 that makes good initial reading for a surface level understanding. And then there's ChibiAkumas which will take you through the entire process of actually getting Z80 programs running. It's initially CPC-based but at the end of the day Z80 is Z80 and it covers a whole bunch of other platforms later.

11 hours ago, jetsetdanny said:

They could use the lists on JSW Central to define the difference 😉. One of the things I feel very strongly about is the difference between what can be considered new games and the 'versions and minor mods' of the two original games. JSW Central makes this distinction very clear by placing them on different lists: one for new games, and two others for the minor mods and versions of MM and of JSW, respectively. Just a suggestion 😉.

I'll definitely use it to help justify the inclusion of any runs I do. I'm certainly not going to do the whole list though...

19 hours ago, jetsetdanny said:

Why? Many of them are actually much better (more interesting, better graphically, more challenging, etc.) than the original games.

If they allowed mods in general, you'd have an issue where the site is flooded with the most minor of mods in which there's basically no difference between them and the original game. It makes sense that they only want mods which are effectively completely new games. It just means that there's a higher standard to meet for acceptance.

My Jet Set Willy II+ TAS has just been published to TASVideos, so now I've done the full set of official/semi-official Miner Willy games.

I'll probably focus on some other games for a bit before I come back to Miner Willy, but when I do some things I'm thinking of working on:

• Manic Miner GBA - there's already one TAS for this but I think it can be improved upon using some of the things we found for the Spectrum version.
• Manic Miner Max Score (no deaths) - since this is how the game is typically played competitively, I should package this together at some point as well, even though it will be 85% identical to the existing run.
• Jet Set Willy WRITETYPER - I've done it myself in real-time in under 3 minutes and seen RuffledBricks do it even faster, so I think it'd be fun to see just how quickly it could be done if you had superhuman reflexes and three hands.
• Jet Set Willy II/+ 100% - visit all rooms, collect all items. It's a lot more work but it would be nice to actually show off some of the more interesting parts of the game.
• Some notable mods - typically these are frowned upon but exceptions can be made for those that are sufficiently different to the originals and provide something new and unique. I'm thinking JSW Nightmare Edition, Manic Panic, and JSW Altered Reality as candidates, as they all do interesting things and would make entertaining viewing when played "perfectly".

4 hours ago, Fallon said:

 

Hello, I have a feature request ~ could an option be added to allow the game to enter full screen without a windows UI border?

Manic Miner Redux is really cool, thanks for this version, it's really fantastic!

Absolutely, I'll look into doing that.

Jet Set Willy Online also had this music, I don't know where it was taken from though.

11 hours ago, BadVideoCard said:

A bit annoying but I was unable to get Manic Miner Redux 11 to launch on either of my PCs (Windows 10).  Here's the error message that pops up...

Oh, even more annoying is that I cant even attach the image :o(

Can you at least quote the error message? I'm assuming it appears as soon as you try to open it?

I think the CPC versions (and JSW2 Spectrum) also allow you to jump from Emergency Generator to Priest's Hole, although I'm not in a position to check right now.