jetsetdanny

What's the Laugh Out Loud smiley now? To me this one: 😀 looks most like laughter, but it is described (when you point the mouse at it) as "Grinning face". I've wanted to use such a smiley many times, but I'm not sure if people will understand what I want to say, so perhaps writing LOL will be best to avoid confusion?

Yes, but it is still only "seemingly proven". Crem's recent posts show that his automatically generated walkthroughs do not always reach the highest scores (because some human scores are known to be better). With this, we can't be 100% sure that the fact that Crem has established 1724 points as the highest possible score in the Central Cavern means that it cannot be improved...

It's comforting to know that human players can still be better than algorithm players, or whatever they should be called properly 🌞. Not for long, though, I suspect...

Thanks for sharing this, crem, it's fascinating! 👍 I meant to make exactly the same comments as Ian made above (great minds...! 🙂), drawing your attention to the highscore challenge scores and the Solar Power Generator, where you will have to optimise the method for the remaining air, as the solar beam is a huge factor there. I am also wondering about JSW games, as the possible routes will multiply the possible options the algorithm will have to analyse. The original "JSW" may be "relatively" simple in this respect, but if you ever wanted to carry out a similar analysis for other JSW games that have been released so far (a complete list is here), you will find some real behemoths among them. Take sendy (Alex Cornhill)'s "where's woody?" for example. 256 edited rooms (although the player does not have to visit all of them to complete the game - that's another challenge for the algorithm, to determine which rooms can be skipped safely), non-linear, hundreds of possible room exits altogether, so I would think thousands and thousands of possible routes to take (or even more - it will grow exponentially, won't it?). I don't know if you have enough processing power to analyse that one 🤪. But it would certainly be interesting to know how much my best in-game completion time (achieved using the Rollback feature and what I decided, after a careful analysis, was the most efficient route) of 2:10 pm can be improved... Meanwhile, I am looking forward to your scores in the next MM caverns - it's very interesting, thanks again! 🙂

Ian, let me explain 🙂. My primary objective has always been that the way to activate the cheat code should be made public. At some point in the past, 2 or 3 years ago as you say, when you had solved the mystery, you chose not to make it public. You did offer to reveal it to me and I said I would try to work it our for myself for the following reason: if you had revealed it to me, I wouldn't have felt I had a "moral right" to make it public, especially if you hadn't thought it was a good idea. If you had insisted that it should not become public knowledge, because maybe someone else would have their fun solving the mystery or for whatever reason, it would have been an awkward situation for me: knowing the solution, but not being able, for ethical reasons, to reveal it. This is why I declared back then that I preferred to continue working on the solution myself, so as to have no qualms and publish it immediately after I discovered it on my own. Which has just happened 🙂. Furthermore, in recent days I did not just ignore your comments and tips. When I started working on this issue on Saturday, I first corrected the error you had spotted in my earlier data table and I tried to figure the solution out by analysing the code. It did cross my mind that three bytes could be involved for each letter instead of two, but, firstly, I had no idea why 1f 1f 1d would correspond to "s" (which I knew was the first letter) and secondly, I made another mistake: when I re-copied the data (in pairs of bytes) I ended it with the #FE which is at #C49B, so I had 14 pairs of bytes, which (if only two bytes were involved) seemed to correspond to 14 letters (I can now see the FE is part of a CP instruction, isn't it?). I knew that there were only 9 letters in the password (because #09 was the value which turned the cheat mode on when POKing the game), but I thought that perhaps the 10 additional bytes had to do with letters that activated antigravity and invincibility. When I wrote previously, regarding your tips, that "I should note that I did not make use of them - I couldn't arrive at the solution on the basis of the code", what I meant exactly was that I did not use them in arriving at the solution. The truth is, I tried to use them, but I failed to succeed in this way, by looking at the code, so then I tried a different method (for which your tips had no impact whatsoever) and it worked. And, to be honest, it was entirely satisfactory for me at any level - after all, I *did* solve the mystery on my own and could announce it "to the whole world" without any qualms - which had been my objective all along 😁. As for something being more or less "Willy-time-effective": once I knew that the brute force method would work (when pressing u" turned the value of #C400 to "02"), I was sure this was the way to go. I knew this method would work; it would take some time, but it was pretty much a guarantee of solving the puzzle successfully. On the contrary, wondering about how the code works has no guarantee of success for me, ever. If I don't understand it, I can spend hours pouring over it, and still fail to succeed, only growing increasingly frustrated in the process. So it is an easy choice for me if a brute force method is available. Having said that, I need to confess that I still don't understand why 1f 1f 1d corresponds to "s". If it is explained in plain terms (which I suspect you might do) so that changing the password becomes easy for me, I *might* change it if I ever design a JSW128 or JSW64 game again (no promise there though). Otherwise, no, I will not be taking up this challenge, as my "Willy-time" will be better spent on other things, sorry 🙃.

Thanks, Ian and Norman Sword! 👍 It is good that this issue has been explained at the code level and can be laid to rest. 🙂 I would NOT have spent another minute thinking about this code. I've spent enough time on this issue already. My approach to this topic is purely pragmatic. How to activate the cheat mode is something I believe should have been made public knowledge a long time ago, even more for the sake of game creators than players. Players can always POKE various things that make game easier into it. Creators, also the ones that only use JSWED and never dabble with the code, however, should be aware of how a feature of their game can be activated - or prevented from being activated - so that they can apply an adequate design (of room 046 in this instance). I created (co-created, to be exact, as these games incorporate a lot of other people's material) Jet Set Willy: The 2005 Megamix, Jet Set Willy: The 2010 Megamix and Jet Set Willy: Mind Control without knowing how to activate the cheat mode, and I wasn't happy about it. I did change the tunes in some projects, and I had no opportunity to test whether the data substitution I carried out (inserting a different tune as the cheat-mode in-game tune) actually worked flawlessly. I would have preferred that someone had revealed this secret so that I wouldn't have had to spend any time on it. Pursuing the issue of how to activate the cheat code was NOT something I enjoyed, it was something I felt NEEDED to be done, and so I dedicated some time to it which I would have gladly dedicated to other MM/JSW-related activities (and, had I not been successful in uncovering the secret [partially] through a combination of insight, brute force and educated guess, I would consider that time to have been wasted). Hence, once the mechanism of activation was revealed at the "player's" level (what needs to be done when playing the game to activate the cheat mode), I would not have bothered to spend any more time on trying to explain it at the code level. I'm glad it has been done, though, as it is better that such things are public knowledge 🙂. So I hope that Ian - or Norman Sword, perhaps? - will now reveal how to activate invincibility and antigravity. Ian already knows, as for Norman Sword - if he doesn't know, it would probably be a breeze for him to see what should be done by looking at the code. I believe this should be public knowledge, too, but I don't consider it as necessary as revealing how the cheat mode along with its special in-game tune should be activated, so I won't be spending any time on it, as I've got other MM/JSW-related things to attend to, far more important from my personal perspective...

It seems like you are now 16 points away from the highest possible score 🙂. 1724 is the maximum anyone has ever been able to achieve (in the ZX Spectrum version, at least) and it's hard to imagine how this could be improved...

I have finally managed to crack how to turn on "the other" cheat mode (i.e. other than the Writetyper cheat) in JSW128 and JSW64 games, at least partly 😁. I would like to thank Ian for his persistent encouragement to have another go at this secret, and for his tips expressed earlier in this thread. However, I should note that I did not make use of them - I couldn't arrive at the solution on the basis of the code. In my "final assault" I cracked the mystery by a mixture of the facts I had figured out before - that the cheat mode indicator is at #C400, the value which turns it on is #09 and that the first letter of the password is "s", which changes the value of #C400 from #00 to #01 - and brute force: I typed in letter after letter to see which one will change #C400 from #01 to #02, then from #02 to #03 and so on. In fact, when I had six characters of the word I am going to reveal below, I guessed the remaining three, so the brute force was complemented by an educated guess 🤪. So here it is: The cheat mode can be activated by typing "superuser" when you are at the floor in room 046 (which in "Jet Set Willy 128K" and "Jet Set Willy 64K" is called "Root"; in other games using this game engine it will have a different name). After a brief border effect, the cheat-mode tune kicks in instead of the regular one and a hash symbol appears to the right of the last remaining life (if both the Writetyper cheat and the other cheat mode are activated, the Writetyper foot is next to the last remaining life, and the other cheat mode symbol is to its right). At this moment the player has acquired the ability to carry out what John Elliott calls "fast inter-room teleportation": they can move to the room to the left by pressing "z", to the room to the right by pressing "v", to the room above by pressing "c" and to the room below by pressing "x". This tip should also work, in principle, in all of the other games using, respectively, the so-called JSW128 game engine (of which "Jet Set Willy 128K" was the first one) and the so-called JSW64 game engine (of which "Jet Set Willy 64" was the first one). So far, altogether, there are 18 gamma-released games using the JSW128 game engine (here's a complete list) and 24 games using the JSW64 game engine (here's a complete list). When I say the cheat mode should work "in principle", I am referring to the fact that whether or not it can be activated without using POKEs depends on the design of each game. If there is no room 046 at all (because it hasn't been edited), or the bottom of this room is not accessible for the player to type "superuser" while over there, the cheat cannot be activated in a normal way. I did not try to check all of these games to see if the cheat can be activated in them without POKing them or not. Should it not be possible to activate the cheat by typing "superuser" at the floor in room 046, it can be activated by applying POKE 50176,9. It should be noted, however, that if it is done while playing the game, the cheat will be activated (along with the hash symbol), but the in-game music will remain the regular tune. To be able to hear the cheat-mode in-game tune, one would have to either apply POKE 50176,9 on the title screen, before starting the game, or, if it is applied while playing the game, the player would have to lose all their lives (or reset the game by pressing Shift and Space together) and restart it; then the cheat-mode in-game tune will kick in. Both Writetyper and the other cheat mode stay on after the game is over. They are not reset at the start of the next game. Therefore, if someone POKEs in 50176,9 before starting the game and starts with the cheat-mode in-game tune on, the only way to turn it off (i.e. hear the regular in-game tune) would be to POKE 50176,0 (to turn the cheat mode off) and reset the game or restart it after losing all lives, or reload the game. Once the cheat mode is turned on, I don't think it's possible to turn it off by any built-in mechanism, without POKing the game. It's the same as with the Writetyper cheat - once you have activated the cheat, if you want to deactivate it, you either need to reload the game (to start playing again without the cheat activated) or to POKE the game to turn the cheat off. A thing that should also be noted is that, for some reason, the cheat-mode in-game tune is *much* louder than the regular "Jet Set Willy 128K" in-game tune. I'm not sure why it is like this, but the difference in the level of loudness is very pronounced, at least to my ear. The difference is not as big in "Jet Set Willy 64K" (which has a different regular in-game tune than "Jet Set Willy 128K"). So now I hope that Ian will reveal how to toggle on/off the other two features: invincibility and antigravity 😉. Please, go ahead, Ian, and let us know; it's long overdue 🙂.

Thanks for the explanation! I will correct the information on JSW Central that accompanies the screenshots. In any case, it is good to have two forms of boot at the Game Over screen 🙂. Having said that, it is better for the player not to see either of them! 😜

Norman Sword, Thank you for your comments. I am glad that my playthrough did not uncover anything that you would deem as requiring an updated version of the game 🙂. I did not realise that collecting an item made the status bar change. It's good to know that "Control ONE" also displays the room name - I'll have to correct the screenshot on JSW Central taken in Expert mode. There's probably no need to justify myself for not spotting it or indicating the reason, but if I had to, I would say that the fact I missed it is a good testimony to the speed of the game! 😉 The sequencer for generating sequences of numbers sounds like a really advanced technical solution to me! 👍 I have to admit I did not notice what happens in "Amazing Final Inspection". We are privileged to have you here to draw our attention to such things and to explain them 🙂. I have a question regarding your following comment: > The crushing boot onto the plinth does not follow any fixed pattern. It could just as easily have never changed for the duration of all your plays. Do you mean that it changes, or not, randomly? That what I thought was the pattern ("a boot in the Trainer, Normal and Ace modes, and something which to me looks like a high-heeled women’s shoe in the Expert, Lantern and Torch modes") is not a pattern at all, that it was just a coincidence, that the changes could have happened in any order or could have not happened at all? If the answer to the above questions is affirmative, then a next question arises: are the two "boot forms" I've come across the only ones there are, or are there more types of footwear to discover after losing all lives? 😉

I have completed all six modes of Manic Panic. It was a great pleasure to play this game – familiar in many ways, and yet so different from the original Manic Miner 🙂. I like the design of the brand new rooms, especially “Test Station”, “Amazing Final Inspection”, “Particle Collision Chamber”, “Water Permeation” and “Control ONE”. Thank you, Norman Sword, for this new part of Miner Willy’s universe! 👍 And for clearing the doubt of whether or not Willy turned off some of the robots in MM (did he? – I won’t offer any spoilers here 🤪). The game is certainly a great technical achievement, with the many extensions it has in relation to the original MM, while still staying within the “traditional” 48K. Congratulations on writing all this new code, Norman Sword! 👍 It is really nice to be able to play on the whole screen. The speed of the game is probably the highest I’ve seen in MM and JSW games. While this is clearly a technical achievement, I’ve got to say that I’m not particularly fond of the game running *so* fast (that's just my personal preference). The speed of JSW II is just about optimal for me. One particular problem in Manic Panic – pretty much the only problem I should like to mention – is that since the keys seem to react faster to keypresses – as if they were more sensitive – it is difficult to position Willy for jumps which require pixel-perfect positioning, especially the ones where one step makes all the difference between Willy's reaching another platform or falling through its edge. To play with such jumps in one fluid motion is very difficult, but even approaching an end of a platform to adopt such a position may be tricky – you press the key once to make one step, and Willy makes two steps and falls off the platform he’s currently on. As mentioned before, this is pretty much the only critical thing I can say about Manic Panic, because generally I like it a lot. The levels are all fine, the effects allowed by the game engine, such as guardians passing through guardians or non-Air cells without collision, diagonal guardians, droplets, etc. are all great 😀. The ability to play in six different modes is also cool 👍. I found the Lantern mode not really more difficult than the full-visibility modes, as the player can still see everything that’s going on, even though a part of the screen is blue. The Torch mode is definitely the most difficult one, but not extremely difficult if one uses Rollback (it’s been a *long* time since I tried to complete any game without using either Rollback or snapshots, and I judge the difficulty of any given game against playing in this way). A little feature I particularly like is the fact that the boot that crashes Willy after losing the last life is actually a boot in the Trainer, Normal and Ace modes, and something which to me looks like a high-heeled women’s shoe in the Expert, Lantern and Torch modes. I am not sure if there is any ideology behind this choice 😉, but it’s a nice little detail. A note to Norman Sword: I believe this *may* be a glitch – unless it’s intentional: when you enter the last room - “Control ONE” – the name of the room is not displayed for a short time, like it is in all of the other rooms, but the status bar shows the high score, the number of spare lives, the room number and the current score immediately after entering the room. I only know the room name because it shows in the attract mode (when the game goes through all of the rooms, showing glimpses of them). If this is not intentional and if you should decide that it deserves fixing, *if* you release v. 1.6, you could also correct the spelling of the room names “Proto Plasmic Exchange” (it should be “Protoplasmic Exchange”, “protoplasm” is actually one word and so is the adjective derived from it) and “Reapers Harvest” (I believe there should be an apostrophe in there somewhere; if the vertical guardians are the reapers, so there’s more than one reaper, it should be “Reapers' Harvest” IMHO). I have created an individual page for Manic Panic on JSW Central. It’s right here, featuring info about the game and a screenshot gallery, including pictures of all of the rooms taken when playing in the Expert and Lantern modes. I did my best to write the info, drawing on the information provided by Norman Sword, to describe the game and its merits accurately (while keeping the description concise enough for the purposes of JSW Central). However, everything can be improved, so please let me know (Norman Sword in particular, but anyone else too!) if you have any comments or see any errors or omissions that should be corrected on that page on JSW Central. My RZX recording of going through all of the 6 modes of the game is available on RZX Archive; you can also watch a YouTube video of it (which gives you the advantage of fast forwarding to any place that may particularly interest you; the video has had over 500 views already and there are some nice comments below it). So, Norman Sword, thank you for this great game 👍, and I am very much looking forward to your future projects 🙂!

Thanks for the info and the loader, Andy! 🙂 For me, personally, the official Software Projects POKEs and the colour code bypass are the only things I would apply as fixes to game variants such as "JSW Mono". These are the things necessary to launch the game and to complete it. Nothing else is necessary, so I don't take it into consideration. I know, it's just a matter of opinion and personal choice, and it's different with variants like your 2015 Bug Fixed Edition, where the whole idea was to correct various issues considered to be bugs, not only the critical ones.

Doesn't it? I think it's debatable. As far as I'm aware (could be wrong), JSW Mono's official release is a patch only. The patch makes the game display in black and white. So whether the resulting game will be buggy or not depends on what file you apply the Mono patch to. If you apply it to a non-fixed original JSW, it will be buggy. If you apply it to a fixed original JSW, it will be fine. There are some JSW Mono files hosted on World of Spectrum and these are impossible to complete because they suffer from the same four bugs which make the original JSW incompletable. However, it would be hard to prove that they are "official" release files, as at present John only provides patches on his website. On JSW Central I provide complete, ready-to-play files of JSW Mono in TAP and TZX formats, including variants with the Wobble and Jiggle patches applied - six bug-fixed files in total 🙂.

Congrats on your new scores, @JianYang! 👍

Thanks again, everyone, for all of your comments! 👍 To answer RuffledBricks's question - no, I'm not on Discord. I guess that the time difference has been explained satisfactorily. I did not realise turning the music off made such a difference, plus indeed the initial comparison was of a with-lives walkthrough with a life-lost walkthrough, so there must have been a difference. I find it amazing how deeply members of the speedrunning community go into detail about how to improve the results, and at the level of perfection RuffledBricks and others must have when playing the game. It's another kind of (wonderful) craziness, a bit like we do here sometimes when we discuss some extremely tiny details of game projects, or pore over the code to find a one-byte saving, and things like that. The intriguing thing is where the optimisation of walkthroughs will stop. I think that we are now very close to perfect routes and executions both in JSW and MM, possible improvements are minimal, and in many rooms simply not possible any more. Is Matthew Smith aware of the existence of the speedrunning community and your achievements? I think it should thrill him to know how much time people spend on his two games and how much effort they put into activities related to them - now almost 40 years after he created them...

Hi guys, Thanks for all your comments and for remembering about some of my scores 👍 What happened back in December, I believe, after I had submitted a batch of my improved scores and the corresponding RZX recordings, was that Andy updated the high scores in those instances where I had improved the best known score, but did not update any of my personal best scores where there was no universal improvement. I did not comment on it at the time as I did not think it was important enough, since my personal best scores, if they only matched some other players' best scores, were not a breakthrough in any sense. Now that it's been mentioned (thanks, JianYang! 🙂), I have updated the High Score table at http://jswmm.co.uk/files/file/108-manic-miner-highscore-challenge/ to reflect all of my personal best scores. I can see that I am behind in the Cold Room right now. I'll have to catch up on that one day... 😇

Guys, thank you for your replies and all the info therein. I feel the time difference I described cannot be due to playing with the music on. It's too big for this, I would think. I make my YouTube videos by recording, from the screen, RZX recordings being played back in Spectaculator. I chose to do it at 24 frames per second. If I did at the NTSC speed of 29.97 frames per second instead, wouldn't the resulting video be shorter, i.e. it would show a quicker completion time if you look at the video's length?

On second thoughts: If my RZX-recording hosted on RZX Archive shows JSW completed at 7:56 am in-game time and you completed the game with an in-game time of 7:57 am, certainly there is some room for improvement. And it might very well allow you to go sub-20. Admittedly, you completed the game just a couple of seconds after the in-game clock turned to 7:57, so you were very close to 7:56. However, I created that recording at a time when my personal (Rollback-assisted) completion time of JSW without any unnecessary loss of life was 7:59 am. I've brought it down to 7:58 since, but I have not tried to improve my with-lives-lost 7:56 am recording. So I would not rule out that repeating the route taken and movements executed in my 7:56 with-lives-lost recording, but with the optimisations I must have applied in my later no-lives-lost 7:58 recording, one could go as low as 7:55 with lives lost. Plus there may be some optimisations that you apply that I have missed (like the On The Roof ceiling warp, although I am not 100% sure that it really saves time). That would mean to me that you could *certainly* go sub-20 on your time scale provided you executed perfectly, while playing live, all of the movements that I was able to execute thanks to dozens (or even hundreds) of Rollback instances. So there's a challenge for you... 🤪

RuffledBricks, I would like to spend more time following your "work" on JSW and watching your videos, but time is sparse, unfortunately. I meant to comment on it more in detail, "properly" (according to my standards), but I can't do it right now. So I'll just comment as much - or as little - as and when possible. Your speedruns are most impressive, taking into account that you are doing it without the possibility of repeating your movements in case of problems 👍. For years now I have been RZX-recording efficient walkthroughs of MM and JSW games made using Rollback. Most of them are hosted on RZX Archive, and some that are not hosted on RZX Archive (because someone else has submitted their recording first) can be found on my website JSW Central. Of course, making RZX recordings using the Rollback feature is a lot easier than playing the game live, without the possibility of correcting your errors. Infinitely easier, I believe. As for the original "JSW", my personal best when using Rollback is finishing the game at 7:58 am in-game time without losing any lives, and at 7:56 am in-game time when losing lives in order to speed up the completion process. I always use in-game time to determine completion time, so your timing - real-world minutes - seems like temperature expressed in degrees Fahrenheit to me 😄. However, when I now look at my YouTube video of my completion of "JSW" without losing lives, I can see that I started the game at 1:14 into the video and reached the toilet at 24:25. That would make my completion time (Rollback-assisted, of course) 23:11. And that's without any unnecessary loss of life, so it can still be improved by losing lives. However, I am not sure how that time compares to your time - taking into consideration the frame rate of the video, etc. It can't be the same time, I believe, since your in-game completion time at 20:24 was 7:57 am, and my in-game completion time at 23:11 was 7:58 am. Evidently, our real world clocks were not running at the same speed 😀. You lost 12 second in the Forgotten Abbey, so your completion time could have been 20:12. I think that going under 20 minutes might be possible, but I wouldn't necessarily bet on it. I did not see any major possibilities for improvement in your video, apart from the beginning and end - is it really faster to collect the "Top Landing" item last? I always do it right after the Bathroom, it seems quicker to me, but I've never tried timing it. You can watch my video to see if I did anything more efficiently than you did. Also, if you have a look at my recording hosted on RZX Archive (it should be there within the ZIP archive), it's the one where I lose lives to speed up the completion. You could have a look to see if I lose lives in the same places as you do - perhaps if I chose different rooms to lose lives (I don't recall off the top of my head what I did, it's an old recording), it might give you some ideas for improvement 🙂.

Merci beaucoup, MtM! 🙂

Cool! 🙂 A concept was created once of 'The Second Coming of Matthew Smith'. Although it's a little outdated now, I can't help but think that a sudden appearance of Impossible Triangles à la Ophoven, all around the world, like the recent appearance of monoliths, could herald such an epiphany... 🤪

Thanks for posting this, JianYang! 👍 A 1983 game ported to a 1977 computer platform in 2020. This is a great testimony to the immortality of "Manic Miner" 🙂.

Thanks, Andy! 🙂

No, there shouldn't be any COPYRIGHT, it should read COPYCARD everywhere. My mistake again (corrected now in the post above). Thanks for spotting the error and bringing it to my attention, Ian - please keep'em coming! 🤪

Oh, sorry! That's my mistake. It should have said "five". I'll edit the original post in a second. Since I did not *mean* to say six, I did not realize this error was there and did not know you were referring to it, so I thought you were referring to my quote from Andrew's list of MM/JSW games. Thanks for bringing this error to my attention! 👍