jetsetdanny

Thank you for releasing the corrected versions, UncleWan! 👍 😊

It's your choice, absolutely. There are some rooms in the history of JSW games where such a challenge (time limit) has been introduced in the same way, by conscious design. So there's no reason to modify it if you like it this way 🙂 . Great! 👍

And some feedback regarding the English version: There's one thing that would benefit from a correction. There is a typo on the title screen: the letters read "FESTVIAL" instead of "FESTIVAL". The same typo also appears in the scrolling message, so it should be corrected there as well. If you decide to correct it and re-release the game, I would also suggest correcting the following spelling issues in the room names and the scrolling message: - "Ha!New year decorations on sale!" - I would capitalise "Y" in "year" (to make it New Year); - "Outer Spacestation" - I would make "Space Station" two words. - "Watching Fireworks with Family !" - there's no need for a space between the "y" in "Family" and the exclamation mark (it would be there in French, but not in English 😉). - In the scrolling message, I believe there is no reason to capitalise the words "Gifts", "Area" and "Midnight" - I would start them all in lower-case letters. Again, it's not criticism, but some suggestions to make your beautiful game, UncleWan, spotless ☺️.

Thank you SO MUCH for this New Year's gift, UncleWan! 🙏 I have just completed the Chinese version of the game. It's an incredible feeling to play a Chinese take on JSW!😁 For those who are wondering whether to have a go at it or not, I will say the following: Please DO! You will not regret it. The game has (what I perceive as) some very markedly Chinese elements - what a delight to see those in a JSW game! - and fresh new graphics and sprites, while at the same time it also features some well-known JSW sprites and some beloved characters from other ZX Spectrum games 🙂 . So thanks again for "Willy’s Spring Festival", UncleWan! 🙂 And if I can just offer a tiny little bit of constructive feedback, I will mention that: - IMO in the opening room it might be better to block the room exit on the upper right with a Fire cell (or delete the rightmost Water cell so that it does not create a possibility of exiting the room without jumping), because once the player exits there, they fall into a Multiple-Death Scenario (MDS) in the room to the right. - An MDS happens also when the player exits "Qiao Shang De HongBao" to the left at the upper level. If it were my game, I would also block the exit there (with Earth cells in this case because of the room design). One could argue that the player has just come from "Ba Zhe Ba Zhe ! QuanBu Ba Zhe !" so they should know that's it's not safe to exit "Qiao Shang De HongBao" to the left on the upper level. That's a valid argument, but I would still block that exit to avoid a possibility of an MDS. - In "HuanYing Lai Dao JiaoZi YuZhou!" there is a time limit, because after a while two guardians collide (the horizontal magenta one at the bottom and the vertical cyan one) and Willy gets killed. It's not a problem in terms of completing the game (because the player has enough time to collect all items if they exit the room temporarily to reset the timer, so to speak), but it might be perceived by some as inelegant - unless it's been introduced on purpose (as a time limit). Again, I'm mentioning these elements in the spirit of constructive feedback, but please don't perceive them as criticism of any kind. I am absolutely delighted with "Willy’s Spring Festival"☺️, I believe the room designs are beautiful and smart, and the ending is fantastic! A great start to the Year of the Fire Horse, which I have every reason to believe will also be an amazing year for JSW games 😀. Happy New Year, UncleWan and everyone! ☺️

Thank you for the update, Hervé! It's good to know how your projects are progressing 😁. A little feedback, if I may: - I would suggest using the British spelling in the title of the "Journey to the Centre of the Earth". So "Centre", not "Center", taking into account the Britishness of JSW and the complete lack of American involvement in this area. - My suggestion for the title of Project 12 would be: "Time Machine: The Middle Ages". The name of that period is used in plural in English, unlike "Le Moyen Âge" in French. Also, perhaps it would be nice to involve Willy in the title by making it "Willy's Time Machine: The Middle Ages"? Just a suggestion 🙂. Your declaration that "these will be my last creations" is certainly a sad one for JSW lovers, but I hope that you might reconsider it in the future. In any case, your game development plans for 2026-2028 are really awesome! 🙂 Oh, and one more little point. If "JSW in London" is supposed to have 128 rooms and you've got 15 rooms ready, it's not 24% - it's a little less than 12% 😉 .

Thank you for information about the progress of your project, UncleWan! It's exciting to know that it is so advanced! 😁 While I personally enjoy difficult challenges, I think that's perfectly fine. In fact, I have a strong feeling that the "general audience" (if one can talk about such a thing) prefers easy games. When new games are released, those that are *very* easy (particularly from the point of view of a person who always plays using the Rollback feature, like myself) seem to get far more attention (in terms of comments) than the more challenging ones. So I think it's a good choice to make your first JSW game easy 🙂 . Absolutely! I'll be very happy to playtest it and give you feedback 😊.

Thank you for this post, UncleWan! Yes, we are aware of the existence of this site. In the Links section of JSW Central I've had the following link for some years now: https://nitta.sakura.ne.jp/jsw/jsw.main.html, described as "Nittamituaki's ranking of difficulty of JSW and similar games". This link doesn't work (hasn't worked for some time), but the content of that page is preserved on the Internet Archive, e.g. here: https://web.archive.org/web/20220429132532/http://nitta.sakura.ne.jp/jsw/jsw.main.html (the author quotes me regarding the most difficult JSW games in existence 🙂). I hope one day he will continue that analysis of the games' difficulty, it sounded interesting. In any case, it's good to know that there's someone also in Japan interested in JSW 😊 .

You are welcome. I will just add that, according to the information I have received from his father, Aaron unfortunately passed away in 2013, aged only 37.

Hi UncleWan, It's great that you have resumed work on your game! 🙂 Regarding the problem with the items, I haven't ever come across it. The item placement works well for me with the Item option selected (I'm using JSWED v. 2.3.7). When I left-click a point on the screen where there is no item, an item is added. When I left-click an existing item, it's deleted. When I hold the SHIFT key and left-click a point on the screen where there is no item, an item is added. When I hold the SHIFT key and left-click on an existing item, another item is added on top of the existing one. Using the Space key works in the same way as using the left click on the mouse, as far as I can tell. So I couldn't explain what was happening to you. In any case, I understand your problem has been solved and it doesn't prohibit you from continuing the creation of your game - is this correct? I wish you good luck with the creation of the game and I will be happy to playtest it before the release and try to help if you run into any problems 🙂 .

UncleWan, how is the creation of your first JSW game going? Is there any chance we will see its release in the Year of the Fire Horse? 🙂

The JSW Central YouTube channel has just reached the milestone of 500 subscribers! 😁 Thank you SO MUCH to everyone who has subscribed - it feels good to know that this way of promoting JSW and MM games reaches more and more people 😊.

“Willy on a Transatlantic Cruise” is a beautifully atmospheric game with a great deal of varied scenery, stretching from the underwater kingdom of Atlantis to… Mars, with different real-world locations in between. You’re going to enjoy it! 😊 Just take your time and rest if it starts to feel a bit long. You can still finish it comfortably before the 20th anniversary of its release, which falls on 10 March 😉.

Hello, Pasquale, welcome to the forum! 😁 I'm glad you have been able to register and a big thank you to Andy for fixing the registration process! 👍

Thanks for playing and finishing The Temple, Mike, and for telling us about it! I believe you are the first person in the world other than Hervé or myself that is known to have completed The Temple! 👍😁 I would kindly suggest that you have a go at "Jet Set Willy in Paris" next, as "Jet Set Willy in London" is... still on Hervé's side of the screen. It will be released later this year, hopefully 😊. Oh, and what is this genuinely wonderful moment that made you laugh out loud in surprise? 🤔

The current number of posts on the forum, as of this moment (before posting this one 😉) is 17,304. I have just established, by counting back along the All Activity line, that post # 17,000 was published back on 4 May, 2025. Should anyone try to verify my counting, please don't hesitate to do so and publish the result here. If no-one questions my result in the next week or so, it will become the official date of passing the 17,000 posts milestone in the Chronology section on JSW Central 🙂 .

Congratulations!!! 😁👏🍾🎉

Mike, I wrote about the game being "relatively easy", and I owe you an explanatory note here: There is a huge difference in the perception of the difficulty of games depending on whether one plays them using some kind of "assistive tools" - like an Infinite Lives POKE or saving and loading snapshots, or using the Rollback feature while recording. The latter two are more powerful than an Infinite Lives POKE, because that POKE only protects you from "simple" loss of life, but not from Multiple Death Scenarios (when you keep losing lives continuously, e.g. like falling down to "Entrance to Hades" in the original JSW). These days I always play using the Rollback feature (which allows you to roll back to a previously marked cue point, so an earlier moment in the game, before you ran into trouble). If I lose a life, I roll the game back to an earlier point, no worries. Because of this, my estimation of the difficulty level of games varies drastically from the opinions of people who play without this or even without infinite lives: they often describe as very difficult what seems very easy to me. Well, you'll judge for yourself how much my description matches your reality 🙂. And do you use any "assistive tools" when you play JSW games, by the way? P.S. *Really* difficult games are difficult even if you play using Rollback or saving and loading snapshots. They would be absolutely impossible for a human to solve with 7, 70 or perhaps even 700 spare lives.

Thank you, Steve! 🙏

Hi Mike, Thank you so much for posting here and for your kind words! 😊 Your post is really exceptional, because it’s not often that we get this kind of elaborate testimony related to the MM and JSW games. I am particularly thrilled to learn that you appreciate the homebrew games that have kept the scene going, as I have spent a lot of time and effort over the years emphasising their value and fighting the concept — sometimes found outside the MM/JSW community — that a game is “just another MM/JSW clone” and, for that reason, not even worth taking a look at. I have always argued that there are many *new games*, made using the exquisite game mechanics and some concepts of the original games, but new titles in their own right, to which their authors dedicated a great deal of time, effort and skill — in many cases probably hundreds of hours of work — with excellent results. I am also very pleased, of course, that you have found JSW Central and the related YouTube channel useful 😁. Your post reminds me of that time back in the early 2000s when I first discovered the existence of ZX Spectrum emulators for PC computers, and then the existence of numerous fan-made MM and JSW games. It was still a couple of years before I started playing them one by one, and before I started work on my first JSW game, but the seed of interest had already been sown by then, and I had it at the back of my mind that I should check out those games that seemed to compensate “with interest” for the earlier lack of more rooms in JSW and JSW II. In case you might be interested, my personal testimony about my involvement with the MM and JSW games is available here. If your trajectory should happen to be similar to mine, the next stage of it will be a desire to actually design some new JSW rooms… or an entire new JSW game! JSWED makes this very easy (v. 2.3.7 is recommended; John Elliott’s calling it the “Latest Unstable Version” is false modesty). CAUTION: It’s addictive! 😉 And meanwhile, it will be a pleasure to hear more from you, or to discuss any aspect of the MM and JSW games you may be interested in 🙂.

There have been various interviews with Matthew Smith over the years. I wonder if he has ever been asked the questions that were asked in this thread. I can't recall any such interview, but that doesn't mean there wasn't one; I've always been more interested in new MM and JSW games than in details concerning the original ones. Back in 2008, Andrew Broad created Manic Miner: Matthew Smith 2008 Remix, based on an interview with Matthew Smith in the Load 48 issue of Retro Gamer magazine. Here's an excerpt from its Readme regarding level 16 (or rather 15, since the first level is traditionally numbered as 0). This is just Andrew's interpretation, not Matt's "source knowledge". I highlighted the most relevant parts in bold. [15] "Flag Bugs": '"I'd run out of names. Or maybe I was thinking in hexadecimal and thought it didn't need one," says Matt. And what are those enemies? "Flag bugs! In the code. If flag bug equals..."' I have put Water-cells in the portal to stop you simply dropping down to collect the item, although it does remove the need for a jump over the portal to collect the top-left item. I think it is more important to force the player to jump over the yellow flag-bug, which is obviously the route that Matthew Smith intended. I have added Fire 2 cells in the top row, just to show them. The Water 2 cells that I put in the portal actually look like switches, so it doesn't make much sense to make them visible. There is a hidden item in the room-definition, as the fifth item has a colour-attribute of 255, which terminates the sequence. So I have undeleted this item.

Thanks for mentioning this. Yes, I still need to update Manic Miner: The Lost Levels 128K's page on JSW Central. The update of the download files will come with the update of the page. Thank you for this interesting story, JianYang! 😊 Your story was a pleasure to read and time well spent 🙂. It was this post. Such moments make me glad that I did manage to - with an enormous and decisive help from my son - to bring the Yahoo! message archive back online 😁.

I AM SO SORRY! I did confuse you with another person, namely UncleWan. He is Chinese, apparently the first Chinese in the world creating a JSW game! My question was really directed at him, but your nickname sounds Chinese to me and I got confused. Sorry about that! And in reality, is your nickname Chinese? It certainly seems to be meant to sound Chinese. Any relation to him?

There's no point arguing with your personal criteria and I have no intention of doing it, but just as food for thought: - You can have a game using the JSW64 game engine where there are 20 single screen levels and 20 connected screens. Would this qualify as a MM game? - You can have a game using the JSW64 game engine where there are 10 single screen levels and 50 connected screens. Would this qualify as a MM game? - You can have a game using the JSW64 game engine where there is 1 single screen level and 127 connected screens. Would this qualify as a MM game?

I've just made it available for download, so no, I wouldn't object 🙂 .

Ethical - for me, no. Legal - if I do decide to publish it, I will do it with an understanding that my action is legal. That's all I can say. Does that mean "no problem" or "no, that's not okay?" It means "no problem". "Ethical - for me, no" was my reply to the question "would there be legal or ethical problems with publishing such a thing?". So my full reply would have been "No, for me there would be no ethical problem with publishing such a thing" 🙂 .