jetsetdanny

Thanks for noticing and mentioning this, Ian! It is a nice little feature if I may say so myself. From the technical point of view, it's not a cell type, though, but something along the lines of a Patch Vector effect. I believe I can reveal, as an historical fun fact, that I originally designed it for the bottom part of "West Lookout", to make the room impassable from right to left at the floor level. However, Sendy preferred not to block the passage there, so the 'special block' finally got placed elsewhere 🙂 .

OK, you were right! 🙂 Although, for the sake of discussion, one could probably say that the fact that someone claims something on their personal blog does not necessarily mean it's true. Corroboration by third parties would be needed to establish the claim to be factual truth. Please note I'm not specifically questioning anything Steve Wetherill says, I'm just referring to a general rule regarding anyone's personal claims of some past achievements. These are cool sprites which may be reused in the future. Credit to Steve will then be in order, I guess...

Yeah, make a couple of quick millions and then I won't have to work any more and will be able to devote all my time to JSW and MM... I'm in! 😁

Thanks for the interesting info and discussion about this tune. I am pretty sure it's not coded into the Spectrum version. The whole game code has been analysed, there is an excellent disassembly, no mysteries left, at least not of this kind. When I listened to the tune you posted in MID format, I couldn't identify it, but I had an association with a movie (I'm not sure if it's a real movie or a figment of my imagination) about a composer who suffers from a creator's block, but then starts hearing this tune in his head, it keeps haunting him, and he tries to discover where it comes from. And gradually he discovers that he was a child survivor of the Holocaust (which he didn't remember, perhaps pushed out of his memory) and that the tune was something from his childhood. And then he beats his creator's block and composes a magnificent symphony based on this tune, which he dedicates to other survivors (or something along these lines; is there really such a movie? 😮)

AI can do marvels these days. Have a look at this 😮.

Thanks for trying, Ian! 👍 Absolutely! I'll give it a few days and then, time permitting, I'll prepare and post here a list of the tunes used in "Manic Person". There's still time to guess/carry out a complete analysis using AI tools 😁.

Thanks for the explanation and the files, Andy! 🙂

I'm glad you like the tunes, Ian! 🙂 There is no list at the moment, but I can make one. Unless people would prefer to guess? Please let me know should this be your preference, I will wait a couple of days before publishing the list 🙂 . "Bad Trip - The Divvy's Lair" (the Skylab room) - yes, the tune here is very Eastern European, indeed. It's a medley of two classic Russian tunes (I'm not revealing any names yet... 😉 ).

Yes 🙂 . Have you reached the last cavern yet and seen what I meant by "Due to the nature of the project I've mentioned, this is not a problem there..." ?

Thanks for posting this, Andy! 👍 This file was discussed in another topic, starting with this message. I recently included it on the newly-created page on JSW Central, which is a 'list' of Files NOT listed on JSW Central. The file was originally uploaded by Vidar Eriksen (Erix1) to his Manic Miner & Jet Set Willy Development Page and has been hosted (still is) since 2000 at http://jswremakes.emuunlim.com/Mmt/mmtools.htm. Two rooms from this file inspired rooms I included in "Jet Set Willy: The 2005 Megamix" and "Jet Set Willy: The 2010 Megamix". The first one is "Konservendosenlager" (43). It inspired the room "Above the Quirky Stairway" (room 097 in "JSW: The 2010 Megamix" and room 070 in "Jet Set Willy: The 2005 Megamix"). I modified the German remix of the screen and introduced new guardians, including sprites from MM and a hybrid composite guardian featuring the lower part of the original Matthew Smith's design and the upper part modified by Darren McCowan. The other room is "I'm Getting desufnoC" (room 100 in "JSW: The 2010 Megamix" and room 098 in "Jet Set Willy: The 2005 Megamix"). It is a remake of "Saege, Ei Und kein Vogel" (07), which is, in turn, a remake of "Cuckoo's Nest" (07) from the original JSW. The playable game file has only been available as a SNA snapshot, created back in 2000 by Gawp (Gary Pearce). Interestingly, you are offering a TAP file here. Where did you get if from/how did you create it? Even more interestingly, your file seems to be more complete than the SNA file mentioned above! 😮(which has been available 'for ever'). In the SNA file room 00 is an unmodified "The Off License". In your file, it's a totally modified room called "Die Ueberquerung". Quite possibly it's the first time that (most) people (other than the creators of this variant) are able to see it! Incidentally, the name of this room indicates there are no diacritical (accented) characters in the game - it's spelled "ueber" with "ue" instead of the u-umlaut (u with two dots above).

What a great moment! 😁 As someone who has completed both variants of the game several times during playtesting, I can highly recommend it to everyone. Good advice: start with the Human Version, it's challenging enough, especially if you play without using Rollback or infinite lives; but then also check out the Inhuman Version. "Manic Person" has got the delicious combination that Sendy's games always offer the player: lovely graphics combined with a cunning technical design, full of challenges. I'm sure you will enjoy the game as much as I have 🙂 .

I have moved the discussion about the differences between the original "MM" and "JSW64: Manic Miner", which resulted from my comment in the preceding posts and Ian's replies, to a new, dedicated topic. Please visit it for more interesting analyses 🙂 .

No specific plans yet. I'll think about it once the times comes for it 🙂 .

Thanks for this, Gyrominiac! It's nice to have these tunes 🙂 . I've just played them in the VLC media player 👍.

Is there really a cavern startup data in "JSW64:MM"? I thought in "JSW64:MM" the starting point in the next cavern reflected Willy's position in the previous cavern (the way he stood when he entered the portal). So I thought it really depended on the player how they finished the previous room, which made the "Amoebatrons' Revenge" trick (passing the horizontal guardian without waiting) possible. But perhaps I'm wrong on that.

Thanks for your insightful analysis, Ian! 👍 You do hang around later on, so the only thing that does matter at the start is to clear the horizontal guardian. It doesn't matter whether you're two pixels ahead or not at this point. At least that's my take on it, without trying to produce a pixel-perfect performance in this cavern (or the other ones). As for the other caverns - yes, you could certainly make some improvements over the performance seen in the videos. Not necessarily because of the starting points - because in most rooms you do hang around later on in the room, so getting a couple of pixels' head start wouldn't make any difference for the completion time of the room. I doubt that any small improvements made after the last 'hanging around' point in each room would yield a *visible* result. To yield such a result, the game's completion time (which I consider to be the moment of reaching the swordfish sign, being an equivalent of the toilet in JSW, kind of) would have to be improved by at least one minute (it's currently 7:35 am; you would have to go down to 7:34 am). That's the big difference between MM scores and JSW times. In MM, where you have points, you can see an improvement of even a couple of points easily. In JSW, where you have the timer (if you have one at all, as it has been eliminated in some games), the only "value" you see as different is a minute of the completion time. I'm sure one could go into analysing the state of the timer (how many ticks are missing until the next full minute), but personally, I wouldn't go into such level of detail, which for me would go against the original design (where hours and minutes are what the player sees, not the internal timer's ticks). So either it's a minute's improvement over the previous best completion time, or no improvement at all...

You're welcome 🙂 . I plan to make the JSW Central YouTube channel a repository of efficient solutions to ALL gamma-released MM and JSW games for the ZX Spectrum, and I'm gradually moving in this direction. Videos of both variants of "JSW64: Manic Miner" have now been added to the channel. Here they are: JSW64: Manic Miner Variant W JSW64: Manic Miner Variant Z I re-recorded RZX walkthroughs of both variants in order to improve on my previous recordings, made in October 2006 (currently still hosted on the RZX Archive). I was able to bring the completion time down from 7:38 am to 7:35 am in-game time. Interestingly, this is approximately the completion time of "MM" expressed "on a JSW time scale". "Approximately", because "JSW64: Manic Miner" plays *almost exactly* like the original "MM", but not 100% (the most notable difference being the ability to jump over the horizontal guardian at the floor level in "Amoebatrons' Revenge" the first time it comes Willy's way after entering the room - this does spare some time in comparison with playing the original "MM").

That's the first impression I've had as well, that this must be the change. I haven't played V. 3 'properly' yet because I've been immersed in other JSW-related activities, but I will get there at some point once other things I'm doing are finished. I look forward to it, too 🙂 .

Thanks for this contribution, Gyrominiac! 👍 Personally, I wouldn't hesitate to bump an old topic on this forum if I had some new input. I believe it's happened over the years, with good results. One of the beautiful aspects of MM/JSW is that people sometimes come back to it after many years (the most beautiful one for me is that some authors have taken up again and released their unfinished games literally decades after they were first created). So it's kind of natural for some topics to be revisited. That's just my personal take on it 🙂 .

It seems that something has been modified in relation to this file today - or perhaps only its description, as the download ZIP seems to be the same. What has changed exactly???

I have just completed posting videos of walkthroughs of the six variants of "Jet Set Willy 64" ("JSW64") on the JSW Central YouTube channel. Here they are: JSW64 V JSW 64 W JSW64 X JSW64 Y JSW64 Z JSW64 [ I re-recorded RZX walkthroughs of all six variants in order to improve on my previous recordings, made in October 2006 (currently still hosted on the RZX Archive). I was able to improve the completion time of Variants V and W (which have JSW rooms plus MM rooms and John Elliott's Clock Tower triptych) from 8:43 am to 8:37 am in-game time, and of Variants X, Y, Z and [ (which only have JSW rooms plus the Clock Tower triptych) from 8:01 am to 7:57 am. You can download my improved RZX walkthroughs from the game's page on JSW Central.

Yes, they do look gorgeous! 🙂 Thanks for your input, Gyrominiac, and welcome to the forum!

It would be nice if one of the old-timers had them and shared them here...

I am not aware of these games ever being released to the public. I joined the Yahoo! Group in November 2004 and was a member until its sad end. I *think* these files were not released in that time frame, because if they had been, I would probably have them. It is possible that they had been uploaded to the Files section of the Yahoo! Group earlier and had been deleted by the time I joined the Group. The only trace I can find of *probably* one of these games is a picture from the Photos section of the Group, from a folder called "1507278557-Willy-goes-to-the-moon". The picture is called 749492550-The-first-3-rooms.jpg and looks like this:

You can surely send me (preferably by e-mail) anything you have you don't see on JSW Central and I will consider whether it belongs there or not. As mentioned before, unfinished projects are not listed on lists of games on JSW Central. This rule is a little bit more relaxed regarding what I classify as versions/minor mods of either MM or JSW, because sometimes it would be even hard to tell whether a certain project is finished or not, and even if they are finished, they may not have 'official' launches as new games would typically have. So there's a chance that some obscure tech demo may qualify to actually be included in the list of MM or JSW variants 🙂 .