jetsetdanny

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... 😉

I have tried the following about 20 or 30 times: - Rolling back my recording to the end of "Amoebatrons' Revenge"; - Waiting a moment (or two, or three) before jumping into the portal; - Once in "Solar Power Generator", waiting motionlessly to see what happens when the solar beam hits the slow-moving red horizontal plane guardian (a few seconds into the game). Every time I did it, the beam got deflected off the red plane. I played the game to the problematic moment twice to see if perhaps the killer beam would not be there any more, but it was there all right. I can't tell the value of the clock, so I don't know what it was every time I entered "Solar Power Generator". But since I tried so many times, with a random (short) wait at the end of "Amoebatrons' Revenge" before jumping into the portal, if it's just a matter of the clock having an either even or odd value, I don't think it's possible that I *never* happened to enter "Solar Power Generator" with a clock value that would allow for the beam *not* to be deflected. It should be pretty much a 50-50 chance, shouldn't it? (between the clock having an even or odd value), so it would be extremely improbable that I wouldn't happen to get the timing (clock value) right even once in 20 or 30 attempts. Any ideas?

In the context of this discussion, I started wondering whether it's better to say "solar ray" or "solar beam". After reading a discussion about the difference between "ray" and "beam" here, I decided that "solar beam" will be better to describe what we see in "Solar Power Generator". I'd like to know how the native English speakers here feel about it 🙂 .

Thanks, I will definitely try to improve my recording of the game played at the slowest speed by taking advantage of this feature! Will report back soon 🙂 .

Norman Sword, Thanks for all these explanations 👍. It's quite fascinating to go into this kind of detail about the game mechanics 🙂 . If I understand your messages correctly, I was not seeing things, i.e. I indeed encountered a solar beam that appeared in one of my playthroughs but not in the other two. Taking this into account: > The clock is not reset between caverns in JSW or in MM and runs all the time. This does introduce a variable into the room that is changing from room entry to room entry. > Since the clock ticks with each and every game loop, the status of the "beam shovers" movement is affected by what value the clock is. > The entry into the Solar Power room is with a game clock that is changing as the rooms/caverns are being played. That change dictates what status the sprite movement is for slow moving sprites. (...) The change is down to the exact time that the cavern is entered and will only set in action one of two possible room playing states. Does it mean I could try to avoid the appearance of the solar beam when playing at the slowest speed by entering "Solar Power Generator" one tick of the clock earlier (or later) than I did in this particular case? In other words, by waiting one tick of the clock at the end of "Amoebatrons' Revenge" to enter "Solar Power Generator" one tick later?

Just to make sure we're on the same page: This is the moment I mean, when Willy gets hit by the solar ray (when playing at the slowest speed). It's at 00:16.182 in the "Slowest speed.mp4" video. AFAICT, this ray does not appear in the same position at the same moment of the game when playing at a fast/the fastest speed. Please have a look at the file "Fast speed.mp4" and tell me if you can see it there. [A theory: This ray appears when playing at the slowest speed only for a split second. Perhaps with the game running at a higher speed there is no time for it to appear? Or perhaps it appears for such a minimal fraction of time that it does not affect Willy (does not exist for a time long enough to be able to affect Willy, so to speak)? Please disregard if it's a stupid theory 😄 LOL].

Norman Sword, if I understand your words quoted above correctly, you are saying that the game plays identically at all speeds, only the speed is different. However, I am quite convinced that in my experience that one solar ray which sapped some money away when I was playing at the slowest speed did *not* appear when playing at a high/the highest speed, which is why my final money score when playing at the slowest speed was inferior to the other two scores. I am not sure if the videos I uploaded before are viewable/can be downloaded (they now seem to be embedded but unplayable). I am re-uploading them below in a ZIP file. Please (@Norman Sword or anyone else) have a look at them (they are only a few seconds each) and let me know if I'm imagining things or if there really is a difference (the unavoidable ray at the slowest speed which doesn't appear when playing at a faster speed). comparison.zip

I have recorded "Manic Jet Set Willy" played at the slowest speed possible, for the sake of completeness (kind of; a complete set of recordings would be one illustrating every possible speed, but creating such a set would be extremely time-consuming and would have little value added IMO). My RZX recording is attached below. I can confirm, based on my subjective feeling, that "Cuckoo's Nest" is exactly as it should be. At this speed I got it right the first time, it wasn't difficult. I noticed an interesting quirk in the Manic Miner part. In this effort, while playing at the slowest speed possible, I completed the game with a better in-game completion time (8:38 am, finishing the JSW part at 7:59 am) than when playing at a very high speed (8:39; 8:00) and at the fastest speed (8:40 am, 8:01 am). That's logical, the lower speed allowed me to be marginally more efficient. However, I concluded this effort with less money (£ 45,782,330) than when I played at a very high speed (£ 45,819,730) and at the fastest speed (£ 45,808,330). The reason for this is a stray solar ray which I couldn't avoid. As far as I can tell, it appears when you play at the slowest speed, but not when you play at the two fast speeds I had played at before. Please have a look at the two videos attached below. The one called "Slowest speed.mp4" shows an excerpt from the game in "Solar Power Generator". The one called "Fast speed.mp4" shows the same moment in the game. At this point I had £ 46,838,230 when playing at the slowest speed, and £ 46,835,630 when playing at a fast speed. As could be expected, my performance at the slowest speed so far had been superior to my performance at a fast speed, as reflected in the "financial result". However, please watch the moment when I drop down to the floor below the yellow vertical guardian, jump to the left, turn around and then jump rightwards onto the conveyor. In both cases, I make the jump onto the conveyor after the solar ray had flashed above me momentarily (with the jump executed a little earlier, I would have hit the solar ray from below and lost money). When playing at a fast speed, I land on the conveyor after this jump and traverse it safely to get onto the next platform. When playing at the slowest speed, after landing on the conveyor I get hit by the solar ray momentarily. Lethal as it is, it saps enough money from my account to affect the final game result. This ray only strikes/appears when playing at the slowest speed. It does not appear when playing at the fastest speed or the fast speed I chose for my other previous recording. [Delaying the jump in order to avoid this ray causes a delay later on, which makes the player miss the best moment to cross the solar ray to collect the item at the upper right, resulting in an even greater financial loss, so it's not a good solution; you *have to* lose this additional little bit of money when playing at the slowest speed AFAICT.] Please note that I think this is actually a very cool feature, with some serious real-world parallels. Choosing the slowest speed possible does not always pay! Low speed on a motorway is not necessarily the safest one. Being too cautious (an attitude similar to driving very slowly) does not always let you carry out your plans and fulfil your dreams - sometimes you need to move faster / more decisively / take a little risk in order to succeed. Great parallels, and a very fitting real-world lesson from "Manic Jet Set Willy" 👍 🙂 . Finally, I should note (I meant to mention it before, but perhaps forgot) that Norman Sword's extra code which makes the solar ray turn red, with a corresponding sound effect, when it's touching Willy (first introduced in "Manic Miner: creme de la creme" IIRC) is a great feature, extremely useful to let the player know if they're doing the right thing in this room or not. It would be good if it was used in all games and rooms where the solar ray challenge is present (that's for the future games, I guess; we won't change the past ones). A video of my walkthroughs of "Manic Jet Set Willy" will be coming to the JSW Central YouTube channel later this month, in a few days, if all goes well 🙂 . Slowest speed.mp4 Fast speed.mp4 Manic Jet Set Willy v. 1.05a - Daniel's RZX walkthrough (slowest speed, music).rzx

Strange times, interacting with machines... Or half-machines 😮

Thanks for this warning, MtM! I am using McAfee on some of my machines and Panda on others (when I say "my" I also mean my family). I don't recall ever using Norton, at least not in the last decade. If you hear anything bad about McAfee or Panda, please let me know! 🙂

What do you mean by "review our website to your site"? Do you want to post a review of jswmm.co.uk on your site? If that's what you want, just write a review and post it on your site, I would say. Or did you mean something else?

Once again, congratulations on squashing both games into 48k, Norman Sword! 👍 And thank you for sharing your excellent work with us, of course 🙂 . Andy, when I played "Manic Jet Set Willy" at maximum speed, I did struggle with "Cuckoo's Nest" a little bit. It did not seem as hard when I played with the speed reduced. I think that it may be that this particular spot is quite challenging in the original "JSW", so much so that any increase in the the speed increases the headache exponentially, and even if the speed is lower, it's still tricky.

Thanks, Andy. The Chronology on JSW Central only mentions the first time a full recording (RZX or video, if RZX distribution has been denied)) of any given released game was made public, as a new development so to speak (responding to the following logic: on that day, the solution to the game became available to the public thanks to a recording). Up till now it mainly referred to the recordings hosted on the RZX Archive. Henceforth, it will probably just refer to the recordings being "published", as they can be published pretty much anywhere. Since you were the first person to publicly present a recording of the completion of the final version of "Manic Jet Set Willy", only you get the mention on JSW Central 🙂.

Less than two hours before the end of the year (local time), I have updated the Chronology section on JSW Central so that it should be entirely up to date now. Please let me know if you notice that something is missing or if you see the need for any other corrections. I am looking forward to what 2022 will bring to the MM/JSW scene! 🙂

All right, I have recorded the game twice, creating recordings which are up to my standard, thanks to using Rollback, of course 😁. I have completed the game playing at the fastest speed possible (with no music) at 8:40 am in-game time, with £ 45,808,330 to my name. I have also completed the game playing at what seemed to be a reasonable compromise between a fast speed and the in-game music playing nicely at 8:39 am in-game time, with £ 45,819,730 to my name. I wish I had this kind of money in real life! I would retire from any professional activities and spend a significant portion of my entirely leisure time on MM and JSW 🙂 . A couple of comments: The Solar Beam is indeed very deadly, and it makes the player complete the game with less money than they have when they enter the penultimate cavern. The losses can be reduced by avoiding the beam as much as possible. I strove to do just that and in each of my walkthroughs I lost exactly £ 1,187,200, which wasn't as bad as losing £6.2 million, but still made me feel less-millionaire... The fact that the in-game clock continues to function in the MM caverns allows for an interesting comparison between the completion time of MM and JSW. I completed JSW at 8:00 am in-game time when playing at a lower-than-highest speed, and at 8:01 am when playing at the highest speed possible. Both of these results are below my standard completion time of the original JSW (without any unnecessary loss of life), which is 7:58 am. This is logical, because with the game running significantly faster than the original, it is more difficult to make pixel-perfect movements in all places here it makes a time difference whether you achieve this kind of perfection or not. I completed the MM caverns in 39 in-game minutes. So while in JSW you go through pretty much three times as many rooms as in MM (59/20), the time needed to complete JSW is only about 50% longer than the time needed to complete MM (in in-game minutes, say 60/39). My further plans: I will create an individual page for "Manic Jet Set Willy" on JSW Central in the near future, in the "Other game engines" section. I will then host the RZX walkthroughs attached below over there, with a complete screenshot gallery, game completion info, etc. The completion of "Manic Jet Set Willy" will probably also be one of the next videos I will make for the JSW Central YouTube Channel. Once again, Norman Sword, thank you for this game and congratulations on achieving your objective of including both classics in one 48K file, with some additional elements! 👍 I am looking forward to your future projects, which I hope will still be MM/JSW related 🙂 . My walkthroughs are attached below. Happy New Year, Everyone! 🙂 Manic Jet Set Willy v. 1.05a - Daniel's RZX walkthrough (fastest speed, no music).rzx Manic Jet Set Willy v. 1.05a - Daniel's RZX walkthrough (fast speed with music).rzx

I have completed the game, twice: playing at the fastest speed, and also playing at a fast speed ("S") but with the in-game music on. I have made RZX recordings of both of these walkthroughs. However, I have to re-record their portions, because I did not wait in the second Kong cavern for the Kong to reach the floor level, with which I lost a couple of million pounds! 😮 Hopefully, I will be able to upload these corrected recordings tomorrow (or rather, later today). Thanks for v. 1.05a, Norman Sword, and for completing this project! Congratulations on squeezing so many things in! 👍