jetsetdanny

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 🙂.

A couple of snapshots taken in Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, last night. When I saw that Santa, I could only think of one thing. I'm sure you'll easily guess what it was 🙂.

Merry Christmas to all, and then a very happy New Year! ❄️ ⛄ 🌞

JSWED's screen size is 800x600. This size was first introduced in version 2.3.0, released on 5th March 2006. Previously, up to version 2.2.9, the screen size was 640x480. If I understand this issue correctly, it is a fixed size and cannot be modified. Which - if 800x600 looks tiny on your 4K display - is an additional reason to use JSWED version 2.3.7 rather than 2.2.9. 640x480 would look even tinier on your screen...

Yes, it is! Thanks for drawing our attention to it, I didn't realise there was such an ability.

I will soon finish an update of JSW Central that I've worked on, off and on, for more than a year. It will be something that, to the best of my knowledge, no-one has ever done before... 🤪 So, watch this space in the coming days 😉

Thanks for this info, Norman Sword!

The fact that you allow free download of your games is greatly appreciated, Norman Sword! 👍

I couldn't understand what you meant, Andy, as the various versions of JSWED were discussed in several preceding posts, and version 2.3.7 has been around since 7th April 2015 (no idea how many downloads it has had, perhaps John Elliott would know). Then it dawned on me you were talking about "Manic Panic" 😁.

Thanks, guys! 🙂 Do subscribe if you can - IIUC, once the number of subscribers goes over 100, I should be able to change the channel's address to a custom one ("youtube.com/user/jswcentral" would be the obvious choice), which would be nice. Thanks for the link to MM 3D! I've just created a new thread about it in the "Manic Miner" section.

Thanks to MtM for bringing this to our attention: https://blakearts.artstation.com/projects/0nlgw5?album_id=2519164 I watched the playthrough and I really like it. The graphics are great, some of the guardians are really cool and feel very Manic-Minerish (like the seals), and I like the lifts-as-portals idea. Blake Robinson has done a great job on this project and I hope one day he will release the game, with all of the original MM levels 👍. EDIT: Edited a typo.

Yeah, that's the reason for the 1125 points' score in that cavern - avoiding the Solar Beam almost entirely. There are a couple of occasions when it does sap the air, but I don't think this can be avoided. I tried some alternatives (like making a particular manoeuvre a little bit later on), but I think they would only lower the score. I don't think there is enough room to improve the final score to beat 39,500, unless there is still a different route somewhere which could improve the score for one of the rooms dramatically. 40,000 is impossible, I believe (and I would wager a moderate amount of money on it 😄).

A few days before this forum was revived, I launched a new YouTube channel to complement the information presented on JSW Central. The channel is here. Please visit and subscribe if you find it interesting. The main aim of the channel is to showcase videos of walkthroughs of Manic Miner (MM) and Jet Set Willy (JSW) games for the ZX Spectrum, keeping high standards of quality. The videos, made from RZX files (recordings of Spectrum gameplay), will show games completed as smoothly, elegantly and efficiently as possible, aiming to achieve the best completion time (in JSW games) or the highest score (in MM games), with no loss of life if it can be avoided (unless indicated otherwise, e.g. in case of speedruns). The walkthroughs will show the protagonist (Willy, or whoever it is in a given game) moving forward firmly, without hesitation, waste of time or unnecessary moves, taking the shortest, most efficient route possible. Videos of walkthroughs of MM and JSW games, created from my RZX recordings made using the Rollback feature, are the only content I am planning to upload to the channel in the foreseeable future. I will do my best to update the channel periodically and expand the ‘game solutions database’ it constitutes gradually, alongside updates to JSW Central. For the time being, I have uploaded 16 videos to the channel. (#10 – that’s my little tribute to the hexadecimal numeral system 😉). They include all of the games from the official Miner Willy canon (Manic Miner, Jet Set Willy, Jet Set Willy II and Allan Turvey’s excellent conversion of The Perils of Willy) as well as the better part of my JSW game projects. I would like to thank Paolo Santagostino, the director of the film "WILLY, 48K about a Legend", for letting me use an excerpt from the rendering of the MM in-game music featured in his movie for my opening theme. His YouTube channel is here, his Vimeo channel is here and his Twitter channel is here. Enjoy! 🙂

I have just commented on WoS about my recent update of the high scores for each cavern. My post on Wos is here. The highlights: - My updated ZIP package with recordings of every level of "Manic Miner - Highscore Challenge" can be downloaded from here. - I have improved all-time high scores in 7 caverns. They are: 02 The Cold Room - 1967 06 Processing Plant - 1821 10 The Endorian Forest - 1835 12 Return of the Alien Kong Beast - 4276 14 Skylab Landing Bay - 1808 16 The Sixteenth Cavern - 1830 19 Solar Power Generator - 1125 - I have also reproduced the best scores reported by others on all of the other levels. So in the current complete set of my RZX recordings you can watch all of the caverns completed as efficiently as anyone has ever done 😁 . The remaining scores (for a convenient reference) are: 01 Central Cavern - 1724 03 The Menagerie - 1903 04 Abandoned Uranium Workings - 1854 05 Eugene's Lair - 1748 07 The Vat - 1825 08 Miner Willy meets the Kong Beast - 4047 09 Wacky Amoebatrons - 1345 11 Attack of the Mutant Telephones - 1720 13 Ore Refinery - 1866 15 The Bank - 1709 17 The Warehouse - 1909 18 Amoebatrons' Revenge - 1314 20 The Final Barrier - 1776 With all this, the highest confirmed possible score in "Manic Miner" is 39,402 points. My recently updated RZX recordings of the whole game, available for download here, are not very far off, showing the completion of both variants of the game with a score of 39,388 points. If you are interested, you can also watch videos made from them, the Bug-Byte version is here and the Software Projects version is here.

Great! 👍 My personal take on the two versions is as follows: Both versions of JSWED - 2.2.9 and 2.3.7 - are excellent tools. I don't find version 2.3.7 to be unstable. I mentioned it to John Elliott, the creator of JSWED, once and his reply indirectly confirmed to me that there is no real reason to regard version 2.3.7 as unstable. However, for some reason he prefers to call it that. He does frequent these pages so perhaps he'll express his current opinion if he reads this. [The only problem I've had on Windows 10 once was that JSWED seemed to freeze after being launched. The simple solution for it would be to grab the upper edge of its window as if you wanted to move it around on the screen, and then it would work just fine. I haven't had that problem recently though]. So for me both version 2.2.9 and 2.3.7 are equally stable for all practical purposes. There are, however, the following factors to take into account when you decide to start using one or the other: 1. Version 2.3.7 can do some things that 2.2.9 cannot. I can't remember off the top of my head whether it concerns the editing of JSW64 games (which perhaps 2.2.9 cannot edit at all) or whether it's something less important, but 2.2.9 does have some limitations in comparison. 2. There are some differences between how you use them. So, for example, when editing a JSW48 game (which uses the same game engine as the original JSW), in order to achieve the same result, you do some things differently in 2.2.9 than in 2.3.7. It is something like: in 2.2.9 you enter the guardian editing options from the list of guardians in the room, but in 2.3.7 you have to leave the editing of the room, go to the "Guardians" section and then edit the guardians in the room of your choosing - this example may not be 100% accurate, I am writing it from memory just to illustrate what I mean. I remember that when I first started using a 2.3.x version after using 2.2.9 and its predecessors for a long time, I couldn't get used to the "other" way of doing things, and, in fact, I kept using 2.2.9 as long as was practical. But then, when I needed to use the functions in 2.3.7 that are unavailable in 2.2.9, I switched to the most current version and finally got used to the way things are done there. And I have been using it as default version ever since, I don't even have 2.2.9 installed on my current computer any more (as I did on the previous machines I was using). So, taking all of the above into account, my personal recommendation would be to start using JSWED 2.3.7 straight away. Good luck, and let us know how it went 🙂.

You sound like a really good candidate to become addicted to JSW editing 😁. If you have never used JSWED, I would encourage you to give it a try, one day when you have just a little more spare time than usually. Nothing really big, without thinking that you need to design a whole new game, just to see how it works, design one room perhaps... That's where the second part of the magic starts - in being able to design new rooms, to create something that looks like JSW but is brand new, coming out of your own inspiration. That's what I did back in early 2004: I installed John Elliott's JSWED version 2.0.3 (the current one at that time, now we're up to 2.3.7), just to see how it worked, and I played around with it for a bit, designing a room which later became "Jump 'n' Jive". And then I started working on another room, and then another, until I realized I wasn't getting enough sleep and I was definitely neglecting my family... And then I released the original edition of "Willy's New Mansion" in November 2004, and I haven't left Willy's 8-bit universe ever since 🙂.