jetsetdanny

I'm not sure I understand your question correctly, but: The POKE to set the starting room to Room r is 34795,r. POKE 33824,r is a useful runtime POKE to teleport to Room r. I have no idea about returning to BASIC on dying. Why would you want to do that?

This game's page on JSW Central is now as complete as it is meant to be. It contains a screenshot gallery, an embedded video from the JSW Central YouTube channel and an RZX recording showing a more efficient completion of the game than the previous best publicly available recording. I have also added more information about the completion of the game. "JSW 16K" has 38 edited rooms (in your post above, you've missed "West Wing", Andy). 33 of them need to be visited to complete the game. It is not necessary to visit "Master Bedroom", "East Wall Base", "Halfway up East Wall", "Swimming Pool" and "West Bedroom" (the room names are slightly different from the original "Jet Set Willy" - most of the articles have been dropped from them, to free some space in memory, I imagine). The item in "Front Door" has to collected as the last one, because there is no way to return to the playing field after collecting it (there's no way to go past the barrel in "Ballroom East"). So if it is collected earlier, the player will not be able to complete the game. The game is fun to play. Certainly it proves that 16K is enough to make an enjoyable platformer! 👍

A good idea. I never realised the room was meant to present a crashed plane until I read about it many years after playing the game on the original hardware 😄 LOL.

Yes, it should be sent to Spectrum Computing. I'll probably do it if no-one else does it in the next few weeks (or months). Right now I am concentrating on other MM/JSW-related things.

When I took screenshots for the game's page on JSW Central, I was wondering if it would make sense to number them in the same way rooms in the original JSW are numbered (plus use a separate numbering for the MM caverns). I decided it did make sense, based on Norman Sword's previous comments (about the cheat being activated in the same room as in the original game, etc.), and I believe his above comment confirms it as well. In practical terms, it probably wouldn't matter if I chose a different way of numbering/naming the screenshots (the numbers are not shown as such on the website, they are just "technical", to have some kind of filename for each PNG file), but it's good to know it was a sound choice 🙂 .

Your attention to detail on Manic 40 Miner's title screen is impressive, Norman Sword! 👍

Thanks for the info, Andy. I've added the link to the game's JSW Central page (offline, for the time being). Will add it to Chronology as well.

Thanks for the info, Andy! I have added a link to the game's page on JSW Central (offline version, it will go online tomorrow or the day after with some other updates). I can see there are some other relative new maps on Pavero's site, I'll have to add these too.

"Manic Jet Set Willy" is not "a significant enough remix" from the speedrunning perspective, according to RuffledBricks, which is fair enough. I would only add that it is "significant enough" from the technical perspective, as it proves that it is possible to cram both JSW and MM into one 48K game. Everything's a matter of perspective 😉 .

Good luck with your Pyjamarama run, RuffledBricks!

The download link is this. The game's development was mainly (perhaps exclusively) discussed and announced on the Central Cavern - The Wonderful World of Willy Facebook Group. In a relatively near future I will add "MANIC-minor" to the JSW Central page of "Manic-4-Noobs". To be precise, I will convert that page to being the page of "Manic-4-Noobs" AND "MANIC-minor". This is because I consider "Manic-4-Noobs" to qualify as a new game made using the MM game engine, and "MANIC-minor" to be a later parallel version of the same project, a little bit like "Frosya the Cat", "Frosya the Cat - Lite Version" and "Jet Cat Frosya" were three incarnations of the same project, so to speak, and they together form one entry on the complete list of MM and JSW games. It is high on my priority list, but I want to do some other things first. Once I've "processed" "MANIC-minor" properly (meaning a description and links on the JSW Central page, a smooth RZX recording, a complete screenshot gallery and a video on the JSW Central YouTube channel), I will make its files available for download also on JSW Central (since I know that the author, who prefers to be credited as "Bob The Polar Bear", although his real name is in plain view on the aforementioned Facebook pages, does not object to it).

Thanks for your comment, Norman Sword. I realised your last three sentences were not serious, but I actually thought there was some conditionality to the cheat activation 😄 LOL. The information on JSW Central has now been corrected 🙂 .

It's never too late to improve it 😉 .

I am now ready to answer this question accurately, and I would like to do it giving a little bit of background and also a current context which sheds some light on my present activities and future plans. If you're not interested in this, please scroll down - the answer to Norman Sword's question is in bold below. Back on 1st August 2005, on the Yahoo! Group (which, sadly, does not exist any more), I described the first of my then "current JSW activities and future projects" as: "1. Playing the existing JSW and MM games to see what other people have done, avoid unintentional copying of their work and to be able to use their clever ideas while giving the authors credit for them." Generally speaking, I've always (since 2004, when I joined the scene) had this idea of playing all of the existing MM and JSW games to completion. I haven't achieved it yet, but I'm well on the way, so to speak. Norman Sword, as a top-quality coder, I'm sure you prefer to do things the most efficient way. I'll try to follow suit. It's much easier to count the games I haven't completed than the ones I have 😉 . The current status is as follows (going by the categories of games listed on JSW Central😞 I. Manic Miner games The only one I haven't completed yet is "MANIC-manor" by Bob The Polar Bear, his second version of "Manic-4-Noobs" released last year. I have completed "Manic-4-Noobs", so I would say the count in the MM category of games I haven't completed yet is 0.5/21. II. Jet Set Willy (JSW48) A. New games The only one I haven't played to completion is Geoff Eddy's "Willy the Hacker". The reason I haven't completed it is because it's incompletable (as originally released) due to one (or more, I can't remember off the top of my head) critical bug. I do intend to prepare a fixed version, play it to completion, and present it to Geoff for approval. It's high on my list of priorities, should be happening this year, if all goes well. So the count of games I haven't finished in the JSW48 A category would be 1/50. B. Advanced modifications of the original Jet Set Willy It looks like I haven't finished "Jet Set Willy 25-100" yet, unless I playtested it and can't remember right now. So the count here would be 1/5. C. Artistic modifications of the original Jet Set Willy I've played all of these games to as close to completion as possible (none of them is toilet-completable). So the count here would be 0/5. III. Jet Set Willy II I've played both of them to completion, so 0/2. IV. Jet Set Willy 128 At this point in time I still haven't completed "Willy Comes Home", "The Time Hole", "Frosya the Cat" (and its two subsequent versions), "Soul Miner", "Jet Set Willy 5: ZX Heroes" and "JSW:FTB". So the count is a staggering 6/18. V. Jet Set Willy 64 I haven't yet played to completion "Ultimate Manic Miner", "Miles Mad Mission", "Clopit!", "Vampire Hunter Willy" and "Willy Meets the Beatles". That's 5/24. VI. Other game engines Without going into the subcategories, I haven't yet played to completion "ZX81 Manic Miner", "Manic Miner Turbo", "Jet Set Willy 16K", "Jet Set Willy in Altered Reality" and "Thoroughly Modern Willy". That's 5/19. VII. Mini games I've completed all of them, so the uncompleted count is 0/4. The total count would be 17.5/148. Not bad, I would say, but of course not satisfactory, either, because I aim to complete them all. So the answer to Norman Sword's original question regarding the number of games I've completed so far is: 130.5. That's only of the "new games", excluding the files I classify as "Versions" of the original MM and JSW (if included, they would increase the count by a few dozen). The count is approximate, of course, as some games have more than one version (the 0.5 itself arises because I've completed one of two versions of a certain game). In case of "Ma jolie", for example, it's just one entry in the list, but I've played it 6 times. No, I've recorded 6 walkthroughs of it (of the Original Edition, Special Edition and Special Edition 2009, each of the hard version "Ma jolie" and the easy version "Ma jolite"), but I've probably played each version at least twice before I recorded it to my satisfaction. So just one entry on the list, but 12 playthroughs. There would be more examples like that. Then there are the files which I classify as Versions of the original Manic Miner and Versions of the original Jet Set Willy rather than new games. I haven't counted these exactly, although I can say that my ZIP on the RZX Archive with recordings of JSW variants includes recordings of 19 variants, and a similar ZIP with recordings of MM variants documents the completion of 15 games, so that's 34 in total, plus there should be a few recordings hosted on the RZX Archive as separate entries (I would have to check to be sure how many there are). Generally speaking, I believe I've completed a large majority of them, with the exception of versions that I didn't feel would need a complete playthrough (like the several fast versions of MM and JSW - I assume they're not different in gameplay from the originals apart from being faster). I've documented most of these efforts with RZX recordings. In some cases I've had a particular satisfaction from playing these versions - for example, in 2018 I discovered that J. G. Harston's version of JSW, hosted on his website since 2007, was incompletable due to a critical bug (apparently nobody tried to play it to completion before me, or if they did, they didn't bother to let J. G. know about the problem). As a result of my bug alert, J. G. released a fixed version and everyone can complete this variant now. My playing MM and JSW games, which I started (in the emulation era) back in 2004, took on a new meaning in July 2006, when I submitted my first RZX recording to the RZX Archive. Since then, I've striven to, first of all, make nice recordings of all previously-released MM and JSW games and, secondly, to keep recording newly-released games as they appear. And submit them all to RZX Archive, of course (until Daren's recent passing). You'll find most of them here and here. The main reason why I did not play several of the JSW128 and JSW64 games when I played the other ones years ago is that someone else had submitted their recordings to the RZX Archive before. So my motivation to play them was lower than it would have been if I had felt a "calling" to enrich the RZX Archive with their recordings. At some point after launching JSW Central in 2015, I started recording RZX walkthroughs of games which were already hosted on the RZX Archive in order to show more efficient solutions to them (pointwise in MM or timewise in JSW) than the ones that were hosted on the RZX Archive. I am still in this process, so to speak. The latest twist to this story happened when I launched the JSW Central YouTube Channel at the end of 2020. Adding a video to the channel seems more "definitive" than uploading an RZX recording, because YouTube does not allow you to update a video - you would have to delete it and upload a new one (with a new link). Ultimately, I aim to present the solutions to all new MM and JSW games on this channel (plus the solutions to at least part of the MM and JSW versions). And I want them to be very good recordings (not necessarily perfect, as perfect is the enemy of good - but up to my standards). This means that: - I have to complete and record all games, because the videos I make are made of my walkthroughs only, not by anyone else; - I have to re-record some of the games I recorded previously, because it turns out that my standards have risen since. At least a part of the recordings I made back in 2006 or 2007 seem sloppy at present. This was particularly visible with the early MM games (probably because you see the result after each cavern, and the difference in performance keeps accumulating along the whole walkthrough), which is the reason why I re-recorded them for the recent YouTube videos. Currently the order in which I play/re-play games is dictated pretty much by what I want to add to the JSW Central YouTube channel. I am adding recordings in a seemingly random order. It's because I want to diversify the videos to make the development of the channel more interesting to viewers. So I add some MM games, then some from the "Other game engines" category, then some JSW48 ones, and so on. I try to alternate between short and long games, new and old ones, difficult and easy ones, etc., also taking into consideration their authors - not to present games by one author all at once (with the exception of my projects, the majority of which were presented first 😉 ). So that's where I am right now and how I am likely to proceed if all goes well. For the development of the JSW Central YouTube channel, from time to time I will have to complete and record one of the games I haven't completed so far. This I will do when the time comes for it. At other times, I will be publishing videos of RZX recordings I made in the past (if I'm satisfied with their quality, or if I couldn't push myself to re-record them, which may be the case with the most difficult games), or videos of my re-recordings of games (in which case I won't be completing games I haven't completed before, but replaying ones I've completed earlier). Please subscribe to the JSW Central YouTube channel if you like it, in order to support these efforts 🙂 (I would like to reach 100 subscriptions to be able to change the channel's address to a custom one).

"Manic Jet Set Willy" has now been added to the list of list of games using other game engines on JSW Central. I have created an additional subcategory for it - "C. The original Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy recreated as one game using a new game engine" - as it did not fit into any of the existing ones (with a resulting renumbering to "D" of the "New games using other game engines" subsection). "Manic Jet Set Willy" also has an individual page with a description, download links, a complete screenshot gallery and an embedded video from the JSW Central YouTube channel. Please let me know if there is anything that should be modified in or added to the description! The YouTube video, showing the game completed three times at various speeds, is here. Once again, congratulations on fitting it all into 48K, Norman Sword! 👍

Thank you so much for this medal, Norman Sword - it's greatly appreciated! 👍 I didn't reply to your question immediately, because, in order to answer it accurately, I had to carry out an inventory of my recordings of completed games. In parallel, I have worked on the "Manic Jet Set Willy" video and its webpage. All of these things are almost ready now (but nothing is online yet). I should be able to upload everything/comment as appropriate very soon 🙂 .

And so it has been done. The page of "It's Wet Jelly" now features a full screenshot gallery.

View File "Manic Miner 5: Los peligros del LSD" - tape version "Manic Miner 5: Los peligros del LSD" is a 1998 game by Ignacio Pérez Gil. It was created using Richard Swann's "Manic Miner Editor" and some other tools. The game was released in April 1998. It is hosted on World of Spectrum, Spectrum Computing and other sites. Its page on JSW Central is here. The game was only released as a Z80 snapshot (a dump of the ZX Spectrum's memory). It has never been released in tape format. However, tape format seems to be the most elegant, complete and definitive way of releasing Spectrum games, reflecting what happened on the original hardware, providing data which you load into the machine's memory 'from zero', rather than having an image of the contents of the ZX Spectrum memory at a particular instance in time. For this reason, I created a tape version of "Manic Miner 5: Los peligros del LSD" in TAP and TZX format, converted from Ignacio Pérez Gil's original Z80 snapshot. Ignacio used an interesting technical solution to introduce Spanish diacritical marks in room names and in the text of the scrolling message. He used the Printer Buffer at #5B00 - #5BFF to add the pertinent code and data. In his Z80 snapshot, the code which allows the use of diacritics resides at #5BF2 - #5BFF, and the data at #5B00 - #5B2F. In order to create a standard "Manic Miner" TAP/TZX file that does not include any data to be loaded into the contended memory (i.e. which loads a block of code starting at #8000), Ignacio's code was moved to the #9B00 - #9BFF range, unused in the original "Manic Miner" (occupied by source code remnants). The code was placed at #9BF2 - #9BFF (and modified as necessary) while the pixel patterns for accented letters are now stored at #9B00 - #9B2F. The rest of the source code remnants were untouched and no other changes were made to the game, apart from the CALL instruction at #92BD - #92BF, which Ignacio himself had modified to point to the additional code in the Printer Buffer and which has now been modified to point to the new location of this code. A simple BASIC loader was created for the game. Ignacio's original loading screen was used for the loading process. It was compressed to a little over half of its original size in order to speed up the loading of the game, in case someone does not use any acceleration method on an emulator or wants to load the game into a real ZX Spectrum. As a result, the player is offered a version of Ignacio Pérez Gil's game which loads from tape and plays exactly as the original. The original Z80 snapshot and Readme are included in the ZIP package available for download for completeness. Andrew Broad's SPECSAISIE 1.3 Beta 5 (the latest publicly available version is v. 1.2), Claus Jahn's ZX-Blockeditor v. 2.4.3 (a newer version 2.4.3.1 is available), John Elliott's JSWED v. 2.3.7 and Andy Ford's Screen Compressor were used to prepare the tape version of "Manic Miner 5: Los peligros del LSD". Richard Dymond (SkoolKid)'s complete MM disassembly (available in hexadecimal and in decimal) was also very helpful in this endeavour, as were Andrew Broad's Technical Notes on his game "Jet Set Willy: The Lord of the Rings". Submitter jetsetdanny Submitted 01/18/2022 Category Manic Miner [Remakes]  

Six JSW Central pages have been updated to to include embedded videos from the JSW Central YouTube channel, improved RZX recordings of each game and updated information about the game's highest documented score / best documented completion time. These are: Manic Miner 2 Manic Miner No. 2 Manic Miner III: Tales from a Parallel Universe Manic Miner 4 Manic Miner 5: Los peligros del LSD It's Wet Jelly I have replayed all of these games and recorded new RZX walkthroughs of them, which improve my previous highest scores/best documented completion time: "Manic Miner 2" score has been improved from 38,073 pts. to 38,778 pts. after reaching the Swordfish sign, and from 39,513 pts. to 40,223 pts. upon first re-entry into the first cavern (an improvement of 710 pts.). It's become one of the few MM games where it's possible to exceed 40,000 pts. Another game where I have achieved such a score is the original edition of Andrew Broad's Ma jolite, which I've been able to finish with 40,040 pts. I can't remember any other example of over-40,000-points score in new MM games off the top of my head. In fact, I will still improve my "Manic Miner 2" score by at least several dozen points. I've realised it's possible when I started recording its Italian version "La miniera 2". I am planning to record both the original German version and the later Italian one with a higher score than the one I've achieved so far. This should happen at some point over the next few weeks. I will make the RZX recordings available for download from JSW Central when they're ready. However, I will not be making another JSW Central YouTube video (unless I present "La miniera 2" as a version of a released game one day, once I've run out of new games and start presenting versions of games; that time is far into the future at this point). "Manic Miner No. 2" score has been improved from 35,048 pts. to 37,290 pts. after reaching the Swordfish sign, and from 36,411 pts. to 38,755 pts. upon first re-entry into the first cavern (an improvement of 2344 pts.). What a poor performance I put in the previous time I recorded it! 😮 "Manic Miner III: Tales from a Parallel Universe" score has been improved from 35,164 pts. to 36,012 pts. after reaching the Swordfish sign, and from 36,417 pts. to 37,270 pts. upon first re-entry into the first cavern (an improvement of 853 pts.). The score of the Special Edition of "Manic Miner 4" been improved from 33,981 pts. to 36,475 pts. after reaching the Swordfish sign (an improvement of 2494 pts. - the highest of them all!). This is the only score that can be quoted for this game, as the air counter keeps resetting itself after the player has completed the final cavern, causing a constant increase in the score, which makes it impossible to re-enter the first cavern. In fact, "Manic Miner 4" is one of the two reasons why I quote the scores after reaching the Swordfish sign alongside the scores upon first re-entry into the first cavern, the other reason being "Manic Miner: The Buddha of Suburbia", where the same thing happens on the final screen. The Swordfish scores are given for all games in order to be able to compare the completion results of "Manic Miner 4" and "Manic Miner: The Buddha of Suburbia" to other MM games. "Manic Miner 5: Los peligros del LSD" score has been improved from 35,344 pts. to 35,726 pts. after reaching the Swordfish sign, and from 36,715 pts. to 37,102 pts. upon first re-entry into the first cavern (an improvement of 387 pts.). Since the game was originally released as a Z80 snapshot only, I have created a tape (TAP & TZX) version of it, which is available for download from JSW Central or from this forum. Finally, the in-game completion time of "It's Wet Jelly", with one life lost (it has to be lost after collecting the items in "Blind jeweller veers into hive" [40], as there is no way to get down safely), has been improved by 6 in-game minutes, from 8:31 am to 8:25 am. The improved RZX recordings can be downloaded from the JSW Central pages linked above. The links to the videos I made of these walkthroughs on the JSW Central YouTube channel can be found there as well; they are also all available in this post. My immediate plans for further updates of JSW Central are: - creating a screenshot gallery for "It's Wet Jelly"; - creating a new, complete page for "Manic Jet Set Willy"; - creating a screenshot gallery of "La miniera 2" on the "Manic Miner 2" page, and offering an improved RZX recording of "Manic Miner 2" and my first RZX recording of "La miniera 2" for download.

JSW Central YouTube channel has been updated with six new videos. These are the walkthroughs of: Manic Miner 2 Manic Miner No. 2 Manic Miner III: Tales from a Parallel Universe Manic Miner 4 SE Manic Miner 5: Los peligros del LSD It's Wet Jelly All of the RZX walkthroughs used for these videos have been re-recorded in recent weeks, with visible improvements over my previous scores/completion time. Please refer to this post for more info about the re-recording of these games and the improvements over their previous scores/completion time I have been able to achieve.

I have tried to continue recording my open RZX recording in Fuse and Spectaculator, but it didn't work in either emulator. An error message was shown in each case. Back in ZX Spin, I tried finishing "Amoebatrons' Revenge" with a different timing multiple times to see if I could enter "Solar Power Generator" at the right moment, but I never got it right, the ray was always deflected off the red plane. I also rolled back my recording to the end of Cavern 17, timed the entry to "Amoebatrons' Revenge" a little differently than I would have done normally, completed "Amoebatrons' Revenge" and tried entering "Solar Power Generator" with various timings at the end of "Amoebatrons' Revenge". None of these efforts produced the desired result in "Solar Power Generator". In view of this and of the probabilities indicated by Norman Sword, I will desist from further attempts, consider my current recording of "Manic Jet Set Willy" played at the slowest speed to be the definitive one, and use it for the video I'm going to make for the JSW Central YouTube channel in the coming days. I don't perceive the fact that the score while playing at the lowest speed will be inferior to the scores obtained when playing at higher speeds as a problem or something negative. To the contrary, as mentioned before, I believe it can be interpreted as an intriguing real-life metaphor: It does not always pay to be overly cautious; sometimes you just need to move fast! 😉

Thanks, Norman Sword. It's been a pleasure playing the game 🙂 . I haven't had the time to try the experiment mentioned in my previous post, but I will definitely do it over the weekend.

Thanks for the suggestion, however... What I need is a complete, single RZX recording of the walkthrough. Yes, I'm using an opened RZX file and I can save it as a snapshot, but that wouldn't serve any purpose, as what I need is not an improved final result as such, but an improved final result in a continuous RZX recording. What I could try - and I will - would be to continue recording this opened RZX file in a different emulator (of the ones that support the recording process). I'm not sure why this should help, but I'll give it a try 🙂 .

Thanks for your comments. I've tried entering "Solar Power Generator" at the right moment (by rolling back my recording to the previous cavern, waiting a little bit and then jumping into the portal) a significant number of times (maybe 20 or 30 again, I didn't count), but I can't get it right, the ray is always deflected. Am I right in thinking that whenever I see this: this means the ray gets deflected by the red airplane? If I am right, then I can't get it right (no pun intended). I am beginning to suspect that it's not really random... I'll try some more tomorrow, but if I can't get it right in another, say, 50 attempts, I'll give up. After all, it's only a matter of losing some £ 30,000... 😉