jetsetdanny

Thanks for this, Ian! :)

Thanks for this, Andy! :)

No worries! I haven't actually observed any issues yet :)

Thanks for the additional file, Ian - indeed the flickering is much more visible when the fix is not in place.

Thanks, Ian. I've had a look at the fixes created by Norman Sword and Ian, and I have to say the improvement is very visible :) . There is a particularly dramatic improvement with the arrows in The Swimming Pool - great difference. Congratulations, Gentlemen! :D One thing I noticed - please note this is not criticism, only feedback since it's been asked for - is that while Willy is manoeuvring on the ramp in West Wing very small parts of him - one of his outermost bits, so to speak - occasionally seem to flicker in red. I'm not sure why it's red, to be honest, but that's what I see (in SPIN). If this really happens (and is not an illusion of mine), it makes me think of cleaning up old music using digital filters. In some cases it eliminates the hiss beautifully, but produces tiny little artifacts here and there which you can hear, something that wasn't in the original recording. So the overall result is definitely much better than the original, but there is just a tiny little bit of new "contamination". Still, this is just something that seems to have caught my attention. On the whole, the improvement is very big :) . So I would just have a couple of questions at this point: - Is there a definitive fix already? If so, which of the above code is it? - Are you both OK with the code being used in "third party" projects, with due credit given, of course?

"A little more still to come" - OK, here it is :) . The RZX recordings of the three versions of "Henry's Hoard" can now be downloaded from RZX Archive, and a video of the walkthrough of the 1985 edition can be watched on YouTube. Please note the walkthroughs are very similar. If you've watched one of them, you've seen them all, basically. They were made for the sake of completeness, not because there were any significant differences between the versions (two rooms have changed names in the MicroHobby version, that's basically it).

Thanks a lot, Andy! :)

Norman Sword, In reply to your recent spate of messages, please note the following: - The people active on this forum do what they enjoy. If we enjoy discussing the spelling of room names, finding little efficiencies in the code or speculating on what Matthew Smith may have meant to do, who are you to tell us we should not be doing this? - We quote things because we react and refer to each other's posts. If everyone just posted things without referring to anything other people have written, this forum would be a collection of monologues. This is not what it is about. - Your efficiency as a programmer - from what you claim, at least - is apparently very high. You deserve respect for this, and you can be a very valuable contributor here. There are many threads on this forum, and new ones can be started easily. You do not have to follow those threads which do not interest you. You are most welcome to follow those which do, or start new ones that you consider pertinent, and your technical contribution is and will certainly continue to be highly appreciated. - The version you have running - 102 rooms, multiple tunes, walls that move, etc. - will you upload it here? Will you release it? Will you publish a disassembly, so that other people - we, who are only beginners at Z80 coding - can profit from your, perhaps professional, expertise? - There is no need to be rude to people who have not done anything to you. This is a friendly forum. People try to be supportive and to appreciate each other's contributions and efforts. As mentioned above, your technical knowledge is and will be appreciated and welcome. However, if it comes accompanied with insults towards other members here or the forum itself, it will be hard to enjoy.

Yes, but there's a little more still to come (strictly related to this subject) :ph34r: .

The file gets downloaded with weird characters in the name: as "Henry's_Hoard_(fixed).zip" instead of simply "Henry's_Hoard_(fixed).zip". Could this be corrected?

View File "Henry's Hoard" (bugfixed versions) Bugfixed files of the three versions of "Henry's Hoard". All changes have been discussed and described in the Readme. Submitter jetsetdanny Submitted 04/10/2017 Category Jet Set Willy [Remakes]  

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" :) .