jetsetdanny

Updates on the JSW Central YouTube channel since the last video I mentioned in this thread: Manic Jet Set Willy Jet Set Emily: Baby on the Go Original Edition Jet Set Emily: Baby on the Go Special Edition Jet Set Emily: Baby on the Go Final Edition Jet Set Willy 16K Willy and the Dodecahedron Jet-Set Willy Ivy where's woody? Willy Takes a Trip MANIC-minor The recordings of "Manic Jet Set Willy" and "MANIC-minor" are very recent (because the games are relatively new), as is the recording of "Jet Set Willy 16K" (because I only completed it for the first time recently). The remaining videos were made from my RZX walkthroughs which I recorded a long time ago. They seemed good enough to be used for the YouTube channel. If I re-recorded these games now, I would do some things differently (like turning while jumping vertically up if a turn is required, instead of jumping up and then turning to face in the other direction), but I decided that these details, which may affect the aesthetic side of the recordings a little bit, were not "serious enough" to warrant a re-recording of these games, which would require a significant investment of time and energy (which I can use better for other MM/JSW-related activities).

And so it has been done. "Manic-4-Noobs" and "MANIC-minor" now share the same page on JSW Central. There is a complete screenshot gallery of each game and a link to a YouTube video, among other things. I have also changed the name of this thread to reflect that it includes both variations of the game. I have been able to complete "MANIC-minor" with a score of over 39,000 points, which proves it is a relatively easy game. The RZX recording (which served as the basis for the YouTube video) can also be downloaded from the game's page on JSW Central. Do give it a try if you haven't played it - it's very nicely done and easy to play! 🙂

And so it has been done. "Manic-4-Noobs" and "MANIC-minor" now share the same page on JSW Central. There is a complete screenshot gallery of each game and a link to a YouTube video, among other things. I have been able to complete "MANIC-minor" with a score of over 39,000 points, which proves it is a relatively easy game. The RZX recording (which served as the basis for the YouTube video) can also be downloaded from the game's page on JSW Central. Do give it a try if you haven't played it - it's very nicely done and easy to play! 🙂

Interesting comparison, Ian! Norman Sword seems to be absent from these parts at present. I do hope he will be back soon 🙂 .

Thanks, Andy, I appreciate your spending time on this and the additional info! 🙂

Thanks, Andy, that's very helpful! 👍

Could someone please load the attached TAP files of Sendy (Alex Cornhill)'s JSW128 games "where's woody?" and "STRANGEL" into an emulator of your choice (or two) and see if they have any in-game music? When you don't hear any music, please try pressing the keys that would normally turn it on if it's turned off. Please let me know what the results are. It won't be a big spoiler if I say these games apparently have no in-game music. I just want to make sure this is indeed the case, that I'm not missing something obvious here. There is no in-game music in my RZX recordings of these games (made years ago), which I am planning to convert to YouTube videos, there are only in-game sounds of jumping, falling, getting killed and item collection. Before I make the videos, I want to be absolutely sure I didn't happen to record the games with the in-game music off, while it could be turned on. Sendy's notes in the Readme files seem to corroborate that there is no in-game music. They read (same language in both files), "if you hear a quiet ticking sound while playing the game, press 'enter' to stop it." I'm not sure what this is referring to exactly, but seems to suggest that there is no in-game music as such, since the player might be able to hear a quiet ticking sound. I'm 99.5% sure there is no in-game music in either game. If someone confirms this, I will consider my certainty to be 100%. Please note I am absolutely not suggesting the games should be 'fixed' to have in-game music or anything like that. I just want to make sure my recordings did not miss something that was present in the 'officially' released files. STRANGEL.tap where's woody.tap

I think a TipShop POKE could be a good solution, not to let your successful 'correction' effort go to waste while at the same time avoiding a suggestion that the game is buggy and so needs to be fixed 🙂 .

Thanks for your detailed analysis, Ian! It will be interesting to see if Norman Sword comments on your observations 🙂 .

Yes, I believe this is indeed the case.

Yes, I did mean The Cold Store, sorry I missed the name.

Better kick those people off to another planet. This one is too nice to leave behind and, what's more, to leave it to greed and foul play!

Personally, I think the game doesn't need fixing, as it's perfectly completable and the necessity to collect the item in "Front Door" as the last one is an additional challenge, which is quite cool. Just my personal opinion 🙂 . Enforcing a particular item to be the last one to collect is not common in JSW games, which is why I think it has some added value here. Off the top of my head, I can think of only one game that does it. In Andrew Broad's "We Pretty" the item in the room ""TH E CAR ROT OF REF LEC T I O N" (63) has to be collected as the last one. If you don't leave it until the very end, all your hard toil in this otherwise very difficult game will have been in vain... Interestingly, I thought that this was conscious design on Andrew's part and that the room's name, which I always read as "The Carrot of Reflection", is somehow related (you come to reflect upon your failure when you didn't leave this item as the last one and try to complete the game, and realise it's impossible, or something to this effect). However, Andrew said (on the Yahoo! Group, which is offline these days so I cannot link to it): "Strangely enough, I had played We Pretty to completion just a few weeks before you, and I too fell for the trap of not leaving the item in "TH E CAR ROT OF REF LEC T I O N" as the last to be collected! And I had been unaware of this pitfall until playing We Pretty again last year. It's not something I intended when I wrote We Pretty - I guess I must have been too set in my ways whilst playtesting." When I let him know my thoughts about the room name, he replied: "An interesting interpretation, but the room-name actually came about in December 1997, when I was reading the following paper: Tyugu E. and Addibpour M. (1996). Declarative reflection tools for agent shells. Pages 203-215 in: Future Generation Computer Systems 12 (2,3). On the Internet at ftp://it.kth. se/labs/se/ Reports/refl- jfgcs.ps. Z (modified 12th April 1996). My father asked me what I was reading about; I said 'declarative reflection', but he thought I said 'the carrot of reflection'!" 🙂

I must have miscalculated then, thanks for the correction. It's actually reassuring that my performance was the same in both cases 🙂 . And no wonder I wasn't able to bring the loss down to 710k points when passing through the beam for the second time - it's simply impossible LOL.

Thanks for your analysis, Ian, detailed as always 👍 Yes, there were various moments in the game where the guardian movements did not seem to be identical with the original, and hence I could not repeat exactly the same manoeuvres as in the original games. I did not report it because I assumed the game was not necessarily supposed to be identical to the original ones in every aspect. As Andy said above, it's a remarkable feat anyway 🙂 . I never analysed the guardian animation as precisely as you did. I can just say that in some places there are differences which are even more visible, so to speak. In "MM", in "Attack of the Mutant Telephones" there is something about outmanouvring the slow-motion green horizontal guardian that is different (and it affects the subsequent moves). In "The Endorian Forest" you cannot jump over the ground-level red horizontal guardian while the yellow guardian is still coming at you, you can only do it a moment later, with the yellow one already moving to the right. There are some other differences in MM, I believe, I didn't try to keep track of them. And in "JSW" there is one thing you can do that you cannot do in the original: you can clear the two lowermost items on the left with a jump from the rope straight away, while in the original you need to swing on the rope back and forth before you can jump successfully. The difference saves you a few seconds. I believe "The Forgotten Abbey" is slightly different, too, at the ground level.

IIRC the problem is that you can't jump over the barrel on the way back (you always get killed) and there is no other way to get back to the main map either. However, if someone proves this thesis wrong, I will be happy to correct the description on JSW Central 🙂 .

Thank you for your suggestion of how to solve the 'stray solar beam' problem, Ian. It was right on the spot! 👍 There was no gap between the frozen-in-time red horizontal guardian and the wall in my original recording, so I had to go through the steps you described. This helped and I found myself (or rather, my Willy, so to speak 😉) in the correct 'reality' to complete the cavern without being zapped by the stray solar beam. As a result, I completed the cavern with 80,000 pts more than in the original recording (exactly the amount that had been lost to the stray beam) and the whole game with 80,100 pts more than in the original recording (thanks to a 100-points improvement at the end of "The Final Barrier"). The improved recording can be downloaded from here. I have also updated the game's page on JSW Central accordingly. As a point of interest, after touching the solar beam for the first time, I lost 560,100 pts in my original recording, and 550,000 points in this one. So I actually did better this time around. However, after touching the solar beam for the second time, my loss this time was 720,000 pts, while the first time around it was only 710,000 pts. The net result was the same in both walkthroughs then (not counting the additional 100 points I 'gained' when touching the ray for the first time, which actually kind of offset the 'loss' I suffered at the end of "Amoebatrons' Revenge", when I waited for the ' infinitesimally short delay' before jumping into the portal). This means that I could probably still improve the final result if I managed to lose 'only' 710,000 pts instead of 720,000 pts the second time I touched the solar beam. I tried it 30 times or more and couldn't get it done, though. I'm not sure why, or rather, how I managed to do it the first time around. Having said that, I consider this 'project' closed, i.e. I will not be striving to improve the final score any more. I will not be updating the JSW Central YouTube channel video either, as my current policy is not to update those videos even if a higher score / better completion time is achieved. Thanks again for your solution, Ian - I gave you due credit in the Readme file which accompanies the improved recording 🙂 .

Welcome to the forum, Sergio353! 🙂

No, no breach of the rules if it's not absolutely necessary 🙂 . You couldn't really compare the game's score when completing the game with one life lost to the scores of the same game completed playing at a different speed if no lives were lost. You would have to lose a life in the other recordings as well to make the comparison meaningful. As mentioned before, I don't have a problem with the game played at the slowest speed being completed with fewer points than when it's played at higher speeds. Nevertheless, I will try to apply the strategy you described in the near future (perhaps this weekend, more likely next week/weekend) to see if I can improve my earlier score 🙂 .

Thanks for these instructions, Ian, I appreciate them! 👍 I do have my recording saved so that I can roll it back easily, so I will have a go at it at some point to see if I can follow your tips and improve the final score. I am taking a short half-break from MM/JSW activities (just for a few days, to focus on some other things briefly), so I will try it once I'm "fully back in" 🙂 .

It's good to see you back alive and kicking, Ian! (that is, analysing and solving 🙂) Thanks for the detailed analysis and explanation of this quirk 👍.

It is never too late for things related to MM/JSW! Sometimes it takes people years to discover some things or, for example, to come back to the scene / their own projects. It's good to see you "actively back" Metalmickey (after some months, I think, rather than years! LOL) I am not a native English speaker, but I would claim that "completability" is a word. It seems not to be recognised by some of the major dictionaries yet, but you can find it e.g. in the Wiktionary and in Your Dictionary. Both define it as "the condition of being completable". Cambridge Dictionary does not have a definition of "completability" yet, AFAICT, but e.g. it defines "readability" as "the quality of being easy and enjoyable to read". So it should probably define "completability" one day as "the quality of being possible to complete", or something to that effect. I trust this day is not far away, and in any case I do use the word in my posts and game Readmes 🙂 .

Using https://y2mate.is/ allows you to download the film as an MP4 file in 1080p quality, with both audio and video. The downloaded file is 531 MB in size and has the following specs: First video stream: 985 kb/s, 1920*1080 (16:9) at 29.970 (30000/1001) FPS, AVC (High@L4) (CABAC / 3 Ref Frames) First audio stream: 128 kb/s, 44.1 kHz, 2 channels, AAC LC I'm not an expert on the various y2mate sites, I can only say they are different. For example, if you go to y2mate.com, you will probably be able to download a very similar file (judging by the indicated size), but if you go to y2mate.tools, the best download option is a 1080p file 468 MB in size, so probably slightly inferior to the one I described above. So if you use any of these sites, there's no need for separate audio and video downloads and muxing. Having said that, if by "mkvmerge" you are referring to https://mkvtoolnix.download/, JianYang, it is indeed an excellent tool IMPO (and completely free, too)! 👍

Looking forward to your progress, Metalmickey! Don't hesitate to let us know if we might be of any assistance 🙂 .

No need for defence, since there's been no attack 😉 . MM/JSW is a long-term engagement for me. I revisit some topics many years later (like re-recording some of my RZX walkthroughs recently; the original ones were recorded back in 2006 or so). It is the beauty of the scene, too. From time to time, there are game authors coming back after many years with brand-new products (like Geoff Eddy did last year). And sometimes they come back to pick up the development of a game that was stopped a few years back. Which reminds me: we haven't heard from Fabian for a long time. I wonder if will continue his excellent work on "Jason in Roddenwald" any time soon? (spelling the title off the top of my head, perhaps with a typo or two)