jetsetdanny

Thanks for the disassembly, Ian, it's much appreciated! :)

I believe - based on information by Ian in a PM - that Andy published post #7000 on 15th September 2017. Please correct me if I'm wrong :) . If I'm right, congratulations on passing another milestone, Andy! :D

No, I meant "novelty", referring to Hacklevel 13, in singular. Yes, certainly there seems to be more than enough stuff to warrant introducing a new Hacklevel :). I am not sure if John Elliott has been following this thread and whether or not he would agree, and - more importantly - whether or not he would be willing and able time-wise to do something about it. I wonder if it would be appropriate to ask him directly?

Yes, I had to play the room several times to get the timing right to escape ;) .

Ian, these new inventions are fantastic! I really like them :)

Great stuff, Ian! :D It would merit to be called HL13 as far as I'm concerned. Perhaps John Elliott would be willing to update JSWED to introduce such a novelty? Attached is a test recording with the collection of the item in "Off Licence". The "Eugene" stays up on top of the screen after the collection (it goes down when Willy re-enters the room). test.rzx

Great stuff, Norman Sword, thanks for sharing it! Do you consider the file you have uploaded to be the final version, or is it still work in progress? When info about this version is placed (at some future point) on JSW Central, would you like it to be called "Manic Miner by Software Projects + BUG-BYTE" or something else?

Thanks for this interesting info, Norman Sword!

Welcome to the forum, Zoomerlon! It's cool that you've found your way here :D . It certainly sounds like a piece of classical music, but I've no idea what it is. I am sure others will know, though :).

I've had no experience with and have no knowledge of this code :( .

Thanks a lot for all the info, Ligan! :) My latest comments below are in green.

Thanks, Andy! :) .

As mentioned in my post above, I completed the game yesterday. It was a great pleasure to play it, because it is full of very smart arrangements of blocks (Cells), which make the way to complete many of the rooms not obvious at all. I mean, it is not immediately apparent which route the player should take, and when you just "dive into" a room without any reflection and try to solve it as you go, you find that you can't do it this way and you have to go back to the start of the room (which I was able to do thanks to using the Rollback feature in the ZX Spin emulator) and take another route. I really appreciated various arrangements which made me go back and think again about which route to take :). This is a great asset of the game, IMO, which makes it technically much more interesting than some of the other, earlier MM remakes mentioned in this thread. Some modifications to sprites and item shapes (and the title screen tune) are also good. The recording of my walkthrough can now be downloaded from the RZX Archive or viewed on its YouTube channel. However, I would strongly encourage everyone to play the game themselves first, before watching the recording, as it's really a lot of fun :). The game is more challenging than many other MM remakes, but at the same time not as hard as "Manic Scribbler", which I believe to be the hardest MM game ever created, or most of Andrew Broad's MM games. So Ligan, congratulations on this fine creation! :D (if it is indeed your work, as I believe it to be). I would like to add the game to the list of MM games on my JSW Central website and so I have some questions in order to make the information which will be placed there as correct as possible: - Is it OK to quote the name of the game as "Manic Miner Hard" (which would be my preference), or should it be just "MM Hard" (or perhaps "MMHard", as in the name of the Z80 file you uploaded)? - Could you please kindly confirm that you are the author of "Manic Miner Hard"? If so, would you like to be credited with anything else other than "Ligan"? (such as your real name or whatever else you prefer). If not, could you please let us know who the author is? - I believe that in Chronology I should mention 6th August 2017 as the date of the gamma-release of the game. Is this correct? Has the game been released somewhere else before here by any chance? I guess that would be all as far as JSW Central is concerned. I just want to say once again that I really enjoyed playing your game, that it was a lovely surprise to see this game appear out of the blue, and that I look forward to any further MM or JSW redesigns you may create. Is there any chance this will actually happen? :)

Truly great stuff, Ligan! :D I have just completed the game and I loved it :) . I'll write more about it soon, when time permits.

From my personal playing experience + imagining what today's kids might like / find acceptable, I would support "Bomb Jack" (played using a joystick, though, not the keyboard) and I would add "Jumping Jack" (played using the keyboard), both having fantastic gameplay which I think makes their "poor" graphics irrelevent. In a similar vein, perhaps "Frogger" could do the trick, too? Plus one of these games (I can't remember the name right now, I think there must have been various versions) where you have a moving platform at the bottom and there is a ball or something which bounces off it and goes up and destroys blocks up there, and then comes back downwards, and you have to be there at the right place to make it bounce back up again. Another of my favourites of the 1980s, with a fantastic gameplay for me, was "Paperboy" (or "Paper Boy", I can't remember the spelling off the top of my head). However, I'm not sure if the graphics would not put them off, taking today's standards into account. Another thought (slightly blasphemous!) would be to use some of the PC remakes of the 1980s classics. They wouldn't convey the full flavour of the originals (loading from tape, etc.), but they might showcase some of the old games with graphics and sound more accessible to the young generation...

It's a very impressive analysis, Ian - thanks! :)

A nice jump :). Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best ;) .

Congratulations on proving me wrong, Ian! I look forward to watching the RZX. It's very difficult - if not impossible - to prove that something is not possible. You try the manoeuvre once, you try it twice, you try it ten times. You can't complete it. You try it another fifty times, and you still can't complete it. Does it mean it's impossible? Not really. You can suspect it is, but you can never be 100% sure. In a sense, it's about how many times you are willing to try. Declaring that something is impossible after trying to achieve it once or twice would be foolish. Declaring it after trying ten or twenty times gives your claim more credibility, but is still far from conclusive. Declaring it after trying a hundred times is even more credible, but still, you never know whether someone else will not prove you wrong. So, in essence, I shouldn't have said: I could only confirm that what you declared to be impossible was indeed impossible! but rather: I could confirm that what you declared to be impossible was probably impossible. It is always "probably", it is never 100% certain...

Thanks for an interesting analysis and pictures, Andy! :)

Andy, thank you for all the files, the meticulous research you have done on them, the descriptions and POKEs provided, and for the modified versions you have supplied! All of this is greatly appreciated :). Concerning this particular game, I just need to mention that there isn't anything such as a Czechoslovakian language. There is the Czech language, and there is the Slovak language. They are very similar (native speakers of both can communicate easily), and yet distinct both in the formal sense (they are considered to be two different languages) and in the real sense (there are minor, but numerous differences in spelling, vocabulary, probably grammar and pronunciation, etc.). The in-game language is Czech, judging by the screenshot of the first cavern on WoS. The name "Central Cavern" is "Centrální jeskyně" (to be precise, with no diactritical marks and capitalised, so "CENTRALNI JESKYNE"), which is Czech. The Slovak name would be (if Google is to be believed) "Centrálna jaskyňa" (which actually shows you nicely how similar and at the same time different the two languages are).

Thanks for all these maps, Andy! :)

Thanks for the explanation, Ian!

That's a fascinating analysis, Ian! :thumbsup: I would just add that I am 100% right handed in real life, and yet I play JSW using QW for left and right. That's because I've grown used to be using my right hand for Insert and Delete related to Rollback.

Thanks for the file and the analysis, Andy! :)

Thanks for the files and the info, Andy! :)