andrewbroad

I have never interviewed Matthew Smith or anyone else.

I didn't conduct the interview myself [Retro Gamer, Load 48, February 2008]; I merely posted a message about it. Matthew Smith said he was "thinking about tweaking a pixel. I'm not sure if it would be better light or dark. I must have tried it both ways back then." My best guess is that he was referring to the pixel highlighted in the item bitmap below: .#.#.... #.#.#... .#.#.#.. #.#.#... .#.#.#.. ..#.##.. ......#. .......#

H* game engine If I could freeze time for everyone except myself, then I would. As it is, I have less than ten hours a year for Spectrum computing while I still have my job. That might be enough to finish a JSW mini-game this year or next, but writing H* would take me thousands of hours. H* will not be a collaboration. I want the satisfaction of writing it on my own, from the first principles of Z80 machine code, at least until the first game, H* Original, is released. I expect that I will want to use 128K for H*, so that I can write a feature-length game with a room format as rich as John Elliott's JSW64 room formats. H* is an abbreviation of H*****: a secret six-letter word. I think that the name H* has an intriguing air of mystique about it.

I plan to write my H* game engine in the 2040s, if I have time between retirement and death. Any games that I might release before then would have to be MM/JSW patches.

There are always copyright issues with MM/JSW. We should really be releasing our games as patches against the originals, or writing our own game engines from scratch.

JSW64 Trigger Stopper Guardian Item Portal... :ph34r:

My local Co-op is getting increasingly bizarre, with its one-out, one-in guard, physical-distancing lines, and windows at the checkouts. Now it has implemented a one-way system for walking round the shop, and closed some of the openings between the aisles. I felt like I was playing a cross between Pacman and Manic Miner!

It is looking that much more likely now that Wimbledon and the entire grass-court season have been cancelled. :(

If the Coronavirus keeps on wiping out tennis tournaments, I might actually have some time for Jet Set Willy later this year!

Everything is an object.

Hello Geoff! Strangely enough, I was thinking about using a patch vector on Saturday morning. I don't think I will, though. Dogmatic adherence to the supposed merits of a particular structure hinders the search for a more appropriate structure.

I vaguely remember something about the Spectrum having bytes for groups of keys, with bits to indicate whether each key is pressed or not. It may well be possible to reverse-engineer the word that activates the cheat mode by studying the relevant code that consults those bytes.

Who's going to do the digging? Miner Willy?

"Soon" would be within the next twenty years, if I will always be as busy as I have been in the last decade. I ended up using my own Jet Set Willy Construction Kit (JSW CK) in the RealSpec emulator to add my ramp, followed by SPECSAISIE's Split function and my Java Cat program to reconstitute the TAP file.

Single-cell ramps In Message 4969 of the Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy Yahoo! Group (2005-10-22), I wrote: "JSWED should allow you to grow a ramp or conveyor off the vertical edges of the screen (but should not allow you to grow a ramp off the top of the screen). I like to exploit wraparound ramps and conveyors in my games, so of all my suggestions, this should be one of the highest priorities." I'm now trying to put a single-cell '\' ramp in the leftmost column of a certain room in a JSW48 game, but JSWED won't let me do it. It seems that the only way to make a single-cell ramp is to grow it to two cells and then shrink it back to one, and JSWED won't let me grow it off the left edge of the screen. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to trying to put a single-cell '/' ramp in the rightmost column. Don't get excited: I'm not planning to release a new game anytime soon.

We just tried that ritual again, and this time it worked. Kari and I are now co-Owners of the Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy Yahoo! Group. :D I, I will be king And you, you will be queen Though nothing will drive them away We can be heroes, just for one day [David Bowie, "Heroes"]

Kari tells me that I could fix my posting problem by making her the Owner of the Group, so that I could leave and rejoin, disclosing my email address. But the Group's Web page is currently giving errors whenever I try to save that change to her membership ("Sorry, an error occurred while loading the content"), so that plan will have to wait indefinitely... Kari cannot post to the Group either, because she too chose not to disclose her email address. The Group's Web page gave her an error when she tried to leave, and she doesn't want to risk unsubscribing by email, lest I be unable to approve her membership when she tries to rejoin. Heavy is the head that wears the crown. I'm afraid I cannot endorse archiving the Group's content, because it raises some thorny issues around copyright, confidentiality, and the ability of users to delete their own content.

I just realised that I have locked myself out of ever being able to post to the Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy Yahoo! Group again, because I chose not to disclose my email address to the Group, and it won't let me change that setting now. The message I got when I tried was: "Since you have chosen not to disclose your email address to the group, you cannot post to this group via email." :(

Issue 201 of Retro Gamer magazine has a ten-page article, "Jet Set Willy: A Guided Tour", which includes a map of the mansion, and room-by-room comments by its author, Matthew Smith. For each of the 60 reachable rooms, there is a screenshot, and a few lines of Matthew's comments (sometimes in the form of questions and answers). Matthew admits that he didn't have the time or energy to fill in the vast empty spaces in some of the rooms, because of pressure from his colleagues. For example, he was planning to do more with "East Wall Base", as the gap in the right wall implies. But where he did put the effort in, he came up with masterpieces such as "The Nightmare Room", "The Banyan Tree", "Orangery", "Tool Shed", "The Wine Cellar", "The Forgotten Abbey", and the most iconic "To the Kitchens Main Stairway". Matthew mentioned the four "lost rooms" in the context of "Tree Root", which has its unreachable right exit set to the empty room "[". "I seem to recall they were up on the roof somewhere, but maybe there was one off here... I think there was a chimney stack in one of them, and I was going to have another room on top of that." I'm guessing that the chimney stack would have been above "Rescue Esmerelda" rather than "The Watch Tower". Matthew identified some of the sprites, which have been the subject of much debate in the MM/JSW community. For example, the one in "The Bathroom" is "two Earths rolling after each other", the vertical guardians in "At the Foot of the MegaTree" are "a bear, wearing overalls, like Rupert", the bald guards in "Rescue Esmerelda" are future Ocean boss Dave Ward, and the heads with six legs in the Ballrooms are a "Bug-Byte bug". Discussing the rumour that a raft would appear in "The Bow" at 11:45pm and take you to an island, he said, "I did think about having stuff happen at different times, like the graphics changing when it got to night, and the Off Licence closing." I could go on and on, but I have now exceeded my quota of MM/JSW activity for the year, and it's not even Christmas yet...

^ Steve Furber was one of my lecturers at the University of Manchester [CS1211 Processor Design].

#0000 is a colour attribute of the form #ARGB, where A is the alpha channel, i.e. the opacity. So #0000 represents a colour that is technically black, but fully transparent (0% opaque). Whereas fully opaque black would be written as #F000 in this format (the

I prefer to use

I have just posted Message 7000 to the Manic Miner & Jet Set Willy Yahoo! Group. Thanks for leaving the honour to me. :)

Or "the value #01".