jetsetdanny

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! 👍

Thanks for v. 1.04, Norman Sword, and for the fascinating technical explanations! 👍 Even though I did mean to playtest v. 1.03, it's on top of my list of priorities, I haven't had the time to do it yet (I haven't done anything MM/JSW-related for more than a week now), I am sorry about it. Since v. 1.04 is already out, I will have a go at it as soon as time permits. There's a good chance it might happen around December 26-28, real-world circumstances permitting. I will certainly report back with the results. And I am looking forward to playing the new version of the game 🙂 .

Thanks for your Miner Willy X-mas cards, Andy and Norman Sword - they're great stuff! 👍 And thanks for starting this thread, MtM! 🙂 Your message to Ian (IRF) reminds me of two of my favourite quotations that I put on "The phenomenon of Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy games" page on JSW Central: "People in the Eighties did not just buy 'home' computers. They fell in love with them. And first loves tend to stick with you for the rest of your life." - Vaggelis Kapartzianis "JSW isn't just a game - it's a relationship! One that stays with you from the very first game." - Adam Britton Hopefully, we will see more of a 'JSW-committed Ian' next year 😉. As for what I asked Father Christmas for Christmas - or rather, for 2022: it is more spare time (at home OR at work 😁) that I could dedicate to MM/JSW. That's pretty much all I need at the moment. Happy Holidays / Christmas to everyone on the forum! And then a very happy, healthy and prosperous 2022!

This is post #14,000! A fitting finale to the year 🙂 (but do continue to post in December, of course! 😉) This may also be a good moment to wish everyone Happy Holidays. So Happy Holidays, Everyone! 🙂

Thanks for new version, Steve! It has a nice feel to it 🙂 . I also like the effect of the items (keys) going up after they've been collected 👍. I downloaded the Windows 10 version and I was able to play it without any problems. I won!... but I was the only player 😮 I tried one little experiment. After colleting all of the upper-level keys and dropping down onto the upper-middle-level platform (to the right of the robot guardian), I tried jumping to the right, so as to land on the right-hand side of the conveyor, to the right of the green Fire cell. In the original game, this manoeuvre is possible, but useless, because you cannot walk along the conveyor to the right (because you drop onto it from a higher level). In your version, after landing on the conveyor and continuing to hold the 'Right' key, I was able to move to the right along the conveyor, step by step, as it were, ever so slowly. At the end of the conveyor I dropped down and regained the ability to move normally. So I was able to do something that cannot be done in the original - traverse the right side of this particular conveyor rightwards. This is just an observation, absolutely not criticism. Thanks again and I hope there will be more versions, will there? 🙂

The (archival) link to Jet Set Willy Online given on the podcast's page: https://archive.org/details/swizzle_demu_Jsw

It was https://www.ovine.net/. It's still there, and it shows a link to JSW Online, but the link redirects to http://www.eyecon64.com/. I don't think the original site can be found online any more. While it was still there, once I downloaded what was probably supposed to be an offline version, or something like that. It is attached. I can see it runs on my Windows 10 machine, but when I try to connect to a game, it asks for an IP address. This is as far as I can get with it, but perhaps someone else will get it to run properly 🙂 . Jet Set Willy Online.zip

Thanks for v. 1.03, Norman Sword, and the detailed description of the updates! Once again, they sound very impressive 🙂 . I will do my best to playtest this version this coming week, real-world obligations permitting. I am looking forward to it, too! If you don't do anything else on Manic Miner / Jet Set Willy/ Manic Panic/ Manic Jet Set Willy, does it mean you won't do anything else MM/JSW-related, or that perhaps you'll work on some brand-new project?

Thanks for asking about our ideas! I would say it should be a race to collect the items. The items should be shared (everyone can collect all of them). Player sprites should be "neutral" and "incorporeal" in relation with each other, i.e. they could pass through each other without colliding or any other kind of effect. If it's a multiplayer game with just the classic MM levels, I think the challenge may be that there are only up 5 keys (items) to collect on each level, and the fastest routes one needs to take to collect them are well known (even the maximum possible scores have been established thanks to human experience and crem's algorithms - see e.g. here and here). So the race would pretty much be down to players trying to execute this optimal route as efficiently as possible, wouldn't it? Perhaps adding multiple items (so that there are e.g. 20 to collect on each level) would help to make the game more interesting?

Today's update of JSW Central includes the following elements: The titles of Adam Britton's games have been changed from The Continuing Adventures, The Deadly Mission and Willy's Holiday to Jet Set Willy: The Continuing Adventures, Jet Set Willy: The Deadly Mission and Jet Set Willy: Willy's Holiday, respectively. The individual pages of these three games: Jet Set Willy: The Continuing Adventures Jet Set Willy: The Deadly Mission Jet Set Willy: Willy's Holiday have been overhauled to include information about their history and completability, download option of bug-free versions of these games converted to tape format, screenshot galleries and embedded videos from the JSW Central YouTube channel. Manic Miner: Trick or Treat? and Manic Miner - The Two Chance Challenge have been added to the list of Versions and minor mods of the original MM, along with individual pages. A 2021 Manic Miner hack by CHIXUS has been added to the Various minor hacks page. Chronology has been updated.

I have now completed "processing" Adam Britton's three JSW games. The individual pages of these three games on JSW Central: Jet Set Willy: The Continuing Adventures Jet Set Willy: The Deadly Mission Jet Set Willy: Willy's Holiday have been overhauled. They now include information about these games' history and completability, download option of bug-free versions of these games converted to tape format, screenshot galleries and embedded videos from the JSW Central YouTube channel. I have decided to change the titles of these games by adding "Jet Set Willy:" as the first part of each name. While there are no text files to accompany the games, I believe you can see from the loading screens it was Adam Britton's clear intention to call them like this. This is also how they were originally released in the "Emulate!" online magazine.