jetsetdanny

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! 👍

Ian, thanks for your kind words and your comments. Here are the answers to your queries: 1. I only mentioned number six in the quotation from Andrew's list of games. He mentioned six variations of JSW participating in an art competition in New York back in 2004. In fact, if you have a look at JODI's website, they are hosting six variations there right now (jsw011, jsw012, jsw013, COPYCARD, SPRITES and STORY). Perhaps they always work with six of them at any given time. What I did was to search for all the versions that ever appeared online that I was able to find. I ended up with 8 distinctive variations, but most of them also had various versions, with timestamps on the files ranging from 2003 to 2016. I did not want to go into such detail in my introductory message, but since you've asked (kind of), below is the list of all JODI files you can currently download from JSW Central. The list includes my bugfixes (so you can see at a glance which ones I deemed necessary to fix) and also the previous names under which some of the variations first appeared. COPYCARD (2003 version, aka L1).sna COPYCARD (2004 version).sna COPYCARD (2010 version).sna COPYCARD (2010 version).tap COPYCARD (2010 version).wav jsw011 (2003 edition, bugfixed).sna jsw011 (2003 edition, original).sna jsw011 (2004 edition, bugfixed).sna jsw011 (2004 edition, original).sna jsw011 (2010 edition, bugfixed).sna jsw011 (2010 edition, original).sna jsw011 (2016 edition, bugfixed).sna jsw011 (2016 edition, original).sna jsw011 (2016 edition, original).tap jsw011 (2016 edition, original).wav jsw012 (2003 edition, bugfixed).sna jsw012 (2003 edition, original).sna jsw012 (2004 edition, bugfixed).sna jsw012 (2004 edition, original).sna jsw012 (2016 edition, bugfixed).sna jsw012 (2016 edition, original).sna jsw012 (2016 edition, original).tap jsw012 (2016 edition, original).wav jsw013 (2003 edition, bugfixed).sna jsw013 (2003 edition, original).sna jsw013 (2010 edition, bugfixed).sna jsw013 (2010 edition, original).sna jsw013 (2016 edition, bugfixed).sna jsw013 (2016 edition, original).sna jsw013 (2016 edition, original).tap jsw013 (2016 edition, original).wav KEYWORDS (bugfix).sna KEYWORDS (original).sna SPRITES (2004 version, aka GRAPHICS).sna SPRITES (2016 version).sna SPRITES (2016 version).tap SPRITES (2016 version).wav STORY (2010 version).sna STORY (2016 version).sna STORY (2016 version).tap STORY (2016 version).wav STORY (April 2003 version).sna STORY (March 2003 version).sna SURBITON.sna To make this simpler, I have found the following variations: COPYCARD - 3 versions (2003, 2004 and 2010) jsw011 - 4 versions (2003, 2004, 2010 and 2016) However, since the only difference between the 2010 and 2016 SNA files is at the address #CAA0, which defines the attributes of Air in room 10 - unnamed as they all are - corresponding to "The Front Door" in the original JSW (Air is BRIGHT cyan in the 2010 file and BRIGHT blue in the 2016 file), in my analysis I discuss these two versions together as the 2010/2016 version. jsw012 - 3 versions (2003, 2004 and 2016) jsw013 - 3 versions (2003, 2010 and 2016) KEYWORDS - 1 version (2004) SPRITES - 2 versions (2004 and 2016) STORY - 4 versions (March 2003, April 2003, 2010 and 2016) SURBITON - 1 version (2003) So, some 21 different versions altogether between the 8 distinctive variations. 2. There are 8 links on JSW Central to its "main" page devoted to JODI. They are placed on top of each individual game page, which starts by saying that "... is one of JODI's artistic Jet Set Willy Variations." I did consider adding JODI to the "Authors about their games page", but came to the same conclusion you did, that it didn't quite belong there. I am not quite happy with it not being linked from there, but I don't think it should be, and I don't plan to create a new category like "About some authors" in the foreseeable future. I think that with the links on top of the individual games pages it should be easy enough to reach "JODI's main page" on JSW Central for those who wish to find more info about them.

I am pleased to announce that a thorough analysis of JODI’s Jet Set Willy Variations has been added to JSW Central. Please read on for the links. I felt it was something that was long overdue. The only info about these mods I had came from Andrew Broad's old list of MM/JSW games, where it says, "JODI (Joan Heemskirk and Dirk Paesmans) entered six weird variations of the original JSW in an art-exhibition called Seeing Double: Emulation in Theory and Practice (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, 19th March - 16th May 2004). See also their website, which has a different set of SNA files from those hosted here!" So back in October or November 2019 I started serious research on this subject. It turned out to be a huge, daunting task, for reasons I will describe below. I continued to work on it on and off, increasingly feeling that I had to complete this task and update JSW Central before I could proceed with any other substantial updates. My work on this project involved searching the web for information about JODI and their artistic work, searching the web for other versions of JSW Variations than the ones mentioned by Andrew (I found some 20 different game files in total, with time stamps ranging from 2003 to 2016), comparing them (down to code comparison in SPECSAISIE) to see how they differ, and playing them to completion or as near completion as possible. When I determined that some files were not completable, even though it looked like they should be (it was just an error or two that prevented them from being completable, not a conscious design), I came up with their bugfixed versions. Then it was recording RZX walkthroughs, taking screenshots of every room (over 800 in total), creating individual web pages for them on JSW Central, updating the main list of games with a new category, etc. All in all, a lot of work, but I am glad I have finally been able to make it public 🙂. The main page on JSW Central devoted to JODI's JSW Variations is here. It presents some quotes from various online sources that I think explain well what it's all about, an overview of the game files I have found and links to their individual pages. There are five JSW Variations by JODI which I classified in a new subsection I added to "II. Jet Set Willy (JSW48)" - the list of Games using Matthew Smith's original Jet Set Willy game engine for the 48K Spectrum and its modifications. The new subsection is called "C. Artistic modifications of the original Jet Set Willy" and currently includes the following game files by JODI: COPYCARD This variation is based on the copy-protection card: a red, blue, green and magenta grid that shipped with every copy of the original game. The pattern provided access codes that were necessary to launch the game (the colours are mapped into numbers that can be entered on the keyboard). STORY This variation lets the protagonist wander around the text, spelled in all capital letters and without punctuation marks, of the first part of the instructions from the original JSW: ""Miner Willy, intrepid explorer and nouveau-riche socialite, has been reaping the benefits of his fortunate discovery in Surbiton. He has a yacht, a cliff-top mansion, (...)". SURBITON In this particular variation the protagonist, a BRIGHT white square, moves across screens which are either one colour (BRIGHT green or BRIGHT blue) or two colours (divided in half horizontally or vertically, BRIGHT blue and green). No other colours are present in the game, apart from some entirely black Fire cells. There are no guardians in the game. SPRITES This variation lets the protagonist wander around blown-up sprites of guardians from the original JSW. The whole game is in black and white; there are no other colours. KEYWORDS This variation offers maze-like screens across which the protagonist moves as an evolving black square (at times just becoming a black dot or a couple of joint dots). There are no guardians in the game. I decided to place these games in a separate subsection because of their characteristics. None of them is either toilet-, Maria- or bed-completable by design. STORY and (a bugfixed version of) KEYWORDS are item-completable. So is SPRITES, but it only has one item. In the case of COPYCARD (a true horror to move around!) and SURBITON only part of the items can be collected; some are unreachable (that's my conclusion, at least - please correct me if I'm wrong!). Moreover, in the latter game file all items are amassed in one room. All in all, a strong characteristic of these games is that they are evidently not meant to be played with the aim of completing them. I believe they should be enjoyed as works of art, pieces of artistic expression which you can admire while roaming around the screens, but not really complete by triggering a toilet run or anything like that. Still, I did look at them as if they were "normal" games and did my best to determine the degree of their completability. I also added three of JODI's JSW Variations to the list of "Versions and minor mods of the original Jet Set Willy", as, in my opinion, they belong there according to their characteristics. They are fully playable (and toilet-completable after ironing out some bugs), they preserve the layout of the original JSW (with some very minor changes) and their editing involved mainly changes to cell patterns and colours. These three variations are: jsw011 It shows all of the elements of the game as squares of colour attributes. jsw012 It shows all of the elements of the game as squares in black and white. jsw013 It shows all of the cells in the game as letters symbolising their type (A for Air, E for Earth, W for Water, etc.). You can refer to the individual games' pages linked above to read more detailed info about them, have a look at the screenshots and download both JODI's original files and my bugfixes of some of them. You can also download a ZIP file with my RZX recordings of the various versions of these games from RZX Archive. Some websites mention that 10 or approximately 10 JSW Variations have been created by JODI. I have been able to find 8 (that's without counting the different versions of each variation, e.g. I've found three different versions of jsw011, four different versions of STORY, etc. - they are all analysed in detail). Please let me know if you know of/have any other versions than the ones discussed on JSW Central. Please also let me know if you find any errors or discrepancies in my descriptions of them or have any other comments regarding info about JODI's JSW Variations on JSW Central. 🙂

Thanks for digging this up, Norman Sword! 👍

IIRC, the guy in "American Psycho" says it very matter-of-factly, but it's the absurdity of it being said so matter-of-factly in certain situations is what makes it so great. For example, he has a dramatic confrontation with his girlfriend where they break up, or something like that, and then suddenly he gets up and is about to leave. She asks him, tearfully, "Where are you going?", and he replies, "I need to return some video tapes" and leaves. I'm quoting it from memory, I only saw that movie once and it was probably 20 years ago (!), but I remember it as a brilliant satire of modern consumer society and various aberrations related to it 👍.

Thanks, Ian 👍

And another question: Am I right in thinking that "I'll get me coat" is somewhat similar to the classic line "I need to return some video tapes" from the movie "American Psycho" (2000)? The protagonist uses it as an excuse to get out of awkward social situations and, as someone commented here, "It's one of many clever things in the film that makes it such a subtle masterpiece".

Thanks, Ian, the reference was indeed lost on me. What's a Brummie accent? 😧

That's a broad understanding of the term "vice president" (pun intended) 😁

And why do people - at least in the U.S. - drive on parkways and park on driveways? 🤪

Or "Tricenarian Nights" 😀

RuffledBricks, since this is the first time I am addressing you, (a much belated) welcome to the forum! 🙂 Thank you for your excellent contributions. I will refer to them more in detail when time permits, which may be between a week and two-three weeks from now. The list of the room codes for Writetyper in JSW128 you are asking for has indeed been compiled and is available on The Tipshop: https://www.the-tipshop.co.uk/cgi-bin/info.pl?name=Jet Set Willy 128K I hope that helps 🙂.

"Vicenarian Nights" would make a nice room title in a new JSW game 🤪.

Happy New Year all! 🙂 Thanks for the info about the Radetzky March, MtM! Do you know that it has also become one of the popular in-game tunes in JSW games? It was coded as a JSW48 in-game tune by Richard Hallas and first used by Philip Bee in his 1998 game "Jet-Set Willy Ivy". Years later, Richard Hallas's original version was used as one of the four in-game tunes in "Jet Set Willy: The Nightmare Edition" (2016). That same year (2016) it was used as one of the four in-game tunes in the Special Edition of "Willy's New Mansion". In 2017, the introduction to the Radetzky March was used as the title screen tune in "Jet Set Mini", while its main part was used as the in-game tune. The in-game tune was re-encoded by Richard Hallas especially for this project, in an extended shape - a standard JSW48 in-game tune comprises 64 notes, but in "Jet Set Mini" this was extended to 256 notes thanks to changes to the game engine introduced by Ian Rushforth. Furthermore, in the 2018 Special Edition of "Jet Set Mini" the introduction to the Radetzky March, used as the title screen tune, was improved by being made more "dynamic". In 2020 (last year! 😉), Richard's original encoding of the Radetzky March was used as one of the seven in-game tunes in the 48K Edition of "Madam Blavskja's Carnival Macabre". Due to all of the above, when I hear the Radetzky March, I actually think of JSW games rather than "Technician Ted". But that's probably because I haven't played "TT" - a game I did enjoy a lot in the past - for a long time... 🙂

I haven't done anything about it in the recent days. I will come back to it next year - that's in the next few days, hopefully 🙂.