jetsetdanny

Sure, it's OK with me :) . I've only pointed to some articles on the Web which deal with the subject, so they should be credited, I guess.

I've never seen it mentioned before, Ian, thanks for mentioning it! :) It would be a nice feature for a future game. Would the reversal of Angry Eugene's direction be easy to apply also in the original MM?

The room you are referring to is "The Network Port" (21) in his game "ZX Willy the Bug Slayer" (which has the game engine modified further in relation to his first three games, creating what has become known as "Geoff Mode II"). Geoff offered the following disassembly of the PV which does the trick: ; room 21 [Network Port] 9933 21DA80 LD HL, #80DA ; stair direction 9936 3AD385 LD A, (#85D3) ; Willy-s x-coord 9939 E61F AND #1F 993B FE10 CP #10 ; in right-hand half? 993D 3003 JR NC, #9942 ; stairs go left if so 993F 3601 LD (HL), #01 ; otherwise right 9941 C9 RET 9942 3600 LD (HL), #00 9944 C9 RET This PV has also been applied in the room "The River of No Return" (03) in the Special Edition of "Willy's New Mansion", which has two ramps going in opposite directions. To quote from the Readme, "In fact, they are Water-conveyor-ramps thanks to setting the same attributes for Water, conveyor and ramp cells. They use the pixel pattern defined for Water cells, which has been carefully selected, so that their form sits well, visually, in ramps that slope in either direction, and so that they do not display any visible conveyor animation."

According to the information on J. G. Harston's website: Who won the JSW competition? The JSW competition was won by Ross Holman and Cameron Else. Ross then became a writer for the illustrious Your Spectrum, before it became crap. (In a funky skillo sort of way.) I don't know if they got the chopper ride, or met Matthew Smith, but they *did* get the champagne. Ross & Cam hacked JSW, realized that it couldn't be completed as it stood, so produced the necessary fixes - which then became the official Software Projects Pokes - and then completed the game, phoned up Software Projects, told them that Willy went to commune with the Great White Telephone, and that there were 83 objects. According to the information posted here: Software Projects announced a competition with the original release of Jet Set Willy, stating that the first person to complete the game would win a case of champagne and a helicopter ride over London, to be piloted by Tommy Barton, a director of Software Projects. The competition was won by two Londoners; Ross Holman and Cameron Else. The pair opted for cash in place of the chopper ride, but they did get the champagne. (Ross & Cam hacked Jet Set Willy when they realized that it couldn't be completed as it stood because of 4 major bugs, they produced the necessary fixes which then became the official Software Projects pokes. On completing the game they phoned up Software Projects, told them that "Willy went to commune with the Great White Telephone", and that there were a total of 83 objects.)

It's not been tried before, TTBOMK, and I doubt there could be much saving, because the repetition is limited. I mean, you may have five notes (values) which are the same as a little bit later on, and then one note (value) which is different. Even though the five are repeated, say, four times, the one different note following them is always different. So making the sequence of five notes repeat but with the one note at the end different each time would be quite tricky, I think. Please note I'm just writing it off the top of my head to illustrate (what I think is) the problem. The info about five notes and then one note is most probably inaccurate, I'm just using approximate numbers to illustrate the pattern. I'm not sure how much spare space you need, but there is quite a lot of it in the original "JSW". SkoolKid shows most (although not all) of it. In the Special Edition of "Willy's New Mansion" we (meaning Ian and myself) have pushed its use to the limit, I believe, trying to use up every single byte of spare space plus introducing various space-saving optimisations to the original code. "WNM SE" Readme documents it thoroughly, so probably you might find some ideas there if you really need some more free space in your project :ph34r: .

We have just gone over 6000 posts on this forum :D . This fact bears testimony to the healthy and active condition of JetSet Willy & Manic Miner Community :) . AFAICT, post # 6000 was Ian's post #56 in a thread in the Contributor Lounge concerning a certain new project. Please correct me if I'm wrong. In any case, this 4th April 2017 is the day when the milestone was reached. Well done, guys! :)

Congratulations, Ian! So I was right in believing your effort was impressive ;). I can't download the the files right now, I'll have a look at them later :).

I'm unable to follow the details of this, but your effort looks impressive, Ian! It's interesting how Norman Sword will react to it :) .

Or perhaps extra lives were originally meant to be added to the game engine, but finally the idea was never implemented? :unsure:

I am thrilled to report that I have managed to run Andrew Broad's SPECSAISIE for the first time ever, and I've managed to compare two SNA files using it! :D It happened after quite a long struggle with getting it to run, going through the installation of Java JDK, setting the correct PATH variable, creating a Compare.class file from the Compare.java file, and consulting various internet tutorials along the way. All this on a Windows 10 system. I used SPECSAISIE 1.2. The tool is not perfectly user-friendly as far as I'm concerned - the results are displayed in decimal (only) in the Command window (and so have to be copied manually, I believe) - but IT WORKS! It's done its job and delivered exactly what I needed :D . A big thanks to Andrew Broad for it :) , and it's a shame SPECSAISIE - which has many other useful functions in addition to Compare - hasn't been developed further as per plans for it which once existed...

Emulators - running, by definition, on platforms other than the ZX Spectrum - can hardly be considered "Spectrum hardware".

Thanks, Andy, it'll be good to have all these files (the ones you've already uploaded and I'm sure there are many more on their way) available for download from the same place :) .

Thanks a lot for this info, Andy, I appreciate it! :) I need the comparison for one particular purpose at the moment (to be revealed in the near future, hopefully), and since I do have some additional data, I might be able to achieve it in various ways. However, for the future it would be good to be able to compare any two files efficiently. My first choice will be trying to get SPECSAISIE to work (which also has many other useful functions). Should that fail, I would try HxEd and the method you've described. And yes, I do have ZX-Blockeditor and I concur that it's a great tool. I used it last year when creating the final files of the Special Edition of "Willy's New Mansion" and of "Willy Games: The First 30 Years Quiz" :) .

Thanks for your replies, guys! What is HXED exactly? Where can I download it from? Andrew Broad's SPECSAISIE indeed has a compare function: Compare: Compare two SNA files byte-by-byte, reporting addresses for which the two memories have different values, and what the value is for the second memory. So it could be a solution. I did try to install and run SPECSAISIE in the past a couple of times, and always failed, IIRC. However, I was never desperate enough to really get it going - I should have tried harder, probably... I'll think about it.

Does anyone know any application which could compare ZX Spectrum files easily and efficiently? I mean a situation when I have two files (TAP, Z80 or whatever) of the same game, with minor differences, like one is the original and the other is patched. Most of the code is the same, there are just snippets of code here and there which are different, and I want to identify exactly what changes the patch has introduced. What I'm looking for is a program which would either list all the different addresses, e.g. something like: Address File A File B 8500 C3 CA 8501 40 40 8502 86 87 or show two columns of code side by side with the differences e.g. highlighted in red? The perfect program I am looking for would run under Windows, would have a GUI, would be able to show the code in Hex and would be free to use or at least to try :) . Any ideas?

Thanks, Andy! :)

In view of this information, I have re-recorded a portion of my RZX walkthrough showing the completion of the game with all items collected. As a result, I have completed the game with 16 spares lives left (previously 15) at 1:15:50 in-game time (previously 1:16:30). The ZIP with a set of walkthroughs of Ver. +e.22 hosted on RZX Archive has been kindly updated by Daren and can be downloaded from there. The Readme file within the ZIP has also been updated, concerning the walkthrough in question and some other details.

Yes, you're right, Ian. I thought SedricAndCharlie was saying, "Also it looks like that game that Matt was working on with Elite which didn't happen", but apparently I added the "which" in my head myself :o .

Thanks, Andy! :)

Thanks for this, Andy! :)

I've been aware of the existence of the game ever since it was announced. I haven't tried to purchase it. It's always seemed like a commercial gimmick to me. I find it ridiculous that suddenly there was so much fuss about a game from 1985, when other games from that year have been known for a long time, including Richard Hallas's excellent "Join The Jet-Set!", and when there are so many other games made in later years which are certainly (I'm saying it even though I haven't played "Willy's Great Adventure") not worse than this game commercialised by Elite Systems. The author - Terry Lloyd - thinks "it

Thanks, that's fantastic! :D Chronology generally does not mention any dates of when work began on projects, only the beta and gamma releases (plus other stuff, like dates when RZX recordings or maps were published, etc.). However, I will make an exception for "JSWII+", this being a special case, a historical game, 31 years later, etc., and I will include the date when the original listing was scanned :) . Sure, take your time, I will update Chronology whenever pertinent data is available :) .

Thanks a lot for these clarifications! I thought it was necessary to make a suicide jump into the Well, after which, curiously, it is possible to jump and catch the rope before it disappears. Could you please let me know, for the sake of Chronology on JSW Central, the dates when "JSWII+" was first made publicly available (even to a limited group of people, like e.g. registered users of some forum), and then the subsequent releases of new revisions? Or, if there is a place on the web I could verify it, please let me know what it is. I would appreciate very much as detailed information as possible in order to include it in Chronology. The character of the each release would be important, too (beta or gamma), although I guess the latest revision uploaded here can be considered gamma and all the previous ones, beta, wouldn't that be correct? (the question is, of course, if the version which you kindly uploaded here had been made available publicly elsewhere before; if so, when?). Thanks in advance for any help you may offer! :)

JSW Central has been updated. The main change is that "Jet Set Willy II" has been included in the main list of JSW games, as a separate category. So the list now embraces the following categories of games: I. Manic Miner (MM) II. Jet Set Willy (JSW48) III. Jet Set Willy II IV. Jet Set Willy 128 (JSW128) V. Jet Set Willy 64 (JSW64) "Jet Set Willy II" was previously the first entry in the secondary list "Games of MM and JSW interest". However, having given it some thought after the recent attention I devoted to the game because of its new incarnation "Jet Set Willy II+", I have decided that it is unfair for one of the most important games of the genre to be on a secondary list. So now it has a separate category on the main list, even though it is the only entry there at the moment ("Jet Set Willy II+" being a kind of Special Edition, and therefore not meriting a separate entry). Time will tell whether or not, thanks to JSWED, new games using this particular game engine will be created. The original "JSW" and "JSWII" now have their individual pages, with download links (including one leading to this forum :)) and screenshots of all screens in each game (including all "JSWII+" Ver. +e.22 screenshots). Links to YouTube videos of the RZX walkthroughs have been added on all individual pages of MM games (except for "Manic Miner: Jet Set Willy" which I think doesn't exist on YouTube yet :o). The Links page has been revised and updated. External links now open in new tabs. The website is work in progress, of course, and will be developed gradually :) .

A video of this walkthrough, created by Daren of RZX Archive, is now available here.