IRF

Aha, mystery solved! Below are four screenshots taken from the videos embedded in this post of Danny's: https://jswmm.co.uk/topic/649-manic-jet-set-willy/?do=findComment&comment=14272 The first two snapshots show two consecutive time-frames from the 'slow' recording. The last two snapshots are the equivalent two consecutive time-frames from the 'fast' recording. You can see that the guardians (other than the slow HG) are all in precisely the same positions in images 1 and 3, and also in image 2 compared with image 4. Willy is also in almost the same position - in truth, it looks like Danny was on course to complete the cavern slightly quicker in the slow run-through, although the penalty for an additional solar strike more than offset that. For the purpose of this analysis though, Willy is occupying the same character row (which the solar beam either does or doesn't pass through) in all four images. The difference in solar behaviour is actually due to all of the factors I discussed earlier, including the fact that a moving entity can interact to a greater or lesser degree with the solar beam, depending on whether it spans two or three character-rows. (I mentioned that point in relation to Willy in respect of the beam being more or less 'deadly' at times, but it's also true of vertical guardians in so far as they can rotate the beam a greater number of times if the beam passes through them whilst they aren't row-aligned.) In Image 1, the red vertical guardian is row-aligned, so it deflects the beam three times. Since the beam approached the red VG horizontally, that means that it ends up going downwards to the cavern floor. In Image 2, the red VG spans across four character-rows, so it deflects the beam four times. This time it ends up traversing horizontally above the conveyor (and as it happens, through Willy). (Note that the red horizontal guardian occupies the precise same position in both Images 1 and 2. It is just protruding past the edge of its platform, and being a Slow HG it only moves every other time-frame.) Image 3 represents the exact same scenario as Image 1. But in Image 4, the red VG doesn't get the opportunity to send the beam along the top of the conveyor, because by that point, the red horizontal guardian has moved one frame of animation to the right - just enough to pull it away from the path of the solar beam coming down from above, so that the beam continues on downwards to be absorbed by the brick tile in the cavern floor. And as previously discussed, the different position of the red HG (being 'one time-frame behind' in the first two images compared with the last two) can be explained by a different starting value of the air supply for the cavern. A fix would be to round up (or down) the current time counter upon entry to this cavern to the nearest multiple of 8 [that's assuming the air/game clock counter works in the same way as it did in original Manic Miner, incrementing by 4 each time], perhaps by applying an AND #FB (11111011) command to the value of the variable via a Portal Set-up patch? P.S. In the next time-frame after the one shown in image 2, the red horizontal guardian will have moved into the same position shown in image 4, so the solar beam will be heading straight down to the brick tile in the floor - hence the beam only flashes along above the conveyor for a single time-frame during that moment in the first scenario.

Hmmm, I've decided I need to satisfy my curiosity and resolve this issue of the solar beam sequence. It occurs to me that I may have misremembered exactly what changes between an 'odd' versus an 'even' initial air supply in the Solar Power Generator. Rather than involving the higher-up horizontal guardians, it may be the case that the exact position of the vertical red guardian in the middle of the cavern, at a certain point in time, is what prevents the solar beam from flashing past the top of the conveyor in one scenario and not in another. i.e. the solar beam could be deflected leftwards by the horizontal red in both scenarios for a full eight time-frames whilst it's at the leftwards extent of its range, but in one scenario, the precise timing of the red HG is such that the red vertical satellite dish re-deflects the beam down to the cavern floor for all of those eight time-frames, whereas in the other scenario, the red VG is only in the right place for seven of those time-frames, so the beam sneaks past and above the conveyor for just one of those time-frames. What I do recall it is that it was the complex interaction between the slow HG (the only variable when considering the difference between an 'odd' and an 'even' cavern), the positioning of one or more of the other guardians, and the solar beam - at a specific point in time (with unfortunate timing if Willy happens to be 'at the wrong place at the wrong time'!) Further investigation is required - watch this space...

It won't necessarily be an inferior score when played at the lower speed; it just so happens that whilst playing the game in the slow setting, you entered the solar cavern at a moment when the game clock held a certain value ['odd' or 'even'] - which meant that the single time-frame flash of the beam above the conveyor (and through Willy) was 'baked into' the way that the cavern gameplay evolved from the beginning. If you were to repeat a run through the solar cavern with the game running at slow speed, then I believe there's a 50% chance that it wouldn't occur and you could in fact achieve a higher score. (Unless I am mistaken, your testing of Norman's proposition - by waiting around for a short while near the Amoeba portal before entering the solar cavern - did not involve subsequently playing through the whole solar cavern repeatedly; rather, you just checked whether in each case the red HG deflected the beam the first time that it touched it after Willy entered the cavern?) In summary, I am in agreement with Norman that I don't believe the running speed of the game actually has any effect on the mechanics of the solar beam!

Is that picture taken just after Willy enters the cavern? If so, then the red slow horizontal guardian is going to deflect the beam every time, just one time-frame earlier (or later) depending on the status of the game clock at the point when you enter. EDIT: Or rather, the red Slow HG stops deflecting the solar beam one time-frame sooner (or later) depending on the 'odd versus even' initial air supply. What you could have done is press pause as you entered the cavern, kept the pause key pressed whilst doing rapid stabs at a non-functional key (such as 1), whilst counting how many time-frames it takes before the beam is first deflected by the red guardian. And then re-entered the cavern in the way that you did from Amoeba's Revenge, and repeated the exercise. You would probably have found that the number of frames before that occurred varied by 1 on some occasions. EDIT: Oops! No - but see edit below. I just tried in an original MM file and it was 56 time-frames into the cavern when the first deflection of the beam by the red HG occurred. If I changed the starting supply of air by one unit, that would presumably have been either 55 or 57? EDIT: Actually I just tried both scenarios, and in both cases the first deflection occurred in the 56th time-frame (determined by when the yellow HG above moved out of the way of the beam). However, with the original air setting, the initial deflection by the red HG lasted for seven time-frames, whereas with the starting air supply deleted by one unit, the beam was deflected by the red HG for a total of eight time-frames (because it's one frame 'behind' in this alternative reality); so there is a difference but it isn't easily noticeable to the human eye. Much later on in the cavern, as I described in my previous post (two above this one), there is a narrow window of time (due to guardians higher up getting in the way?) whereby the red HG can either only reach the beam for a single time-frame, or else it does not touch the beam at all during that particular traverse along its trajectory. The difference in behaviour is therefore much more obvious to the human eye (Flash versus No Flash). And it explains the difference between your final scores for the cavern, depending on whether or not the beam flashed rapidly above the conveyor at that critical moment when Willy was moving up the conveyor and thus unable to take evasive action.

In theory yes, but in practice it would be impossible for you to know whether the clock currently stores an even or an odd number at any given time.

I noticed something similar last year when I was playing around with a project. I found that reducing the initial supply of air by a single unit (a value of 4 actually, since the game clock is depleted by 4 in each time-frame), the complex interaction of the slow horizontal guardian in Solar Power Generator with the other guardians and the solar beam meant that the beam displayed a different pattern later on in the cavern - it flashed horizontally across the screen for a single time-frame in one scenario, but didn't in the other. Decreasing the initial air supply by another unit (so by 8 in total) reverted the situation back to the original. So I concluded that the game play for caverns with a slow horizontal guardian was slightly different depending on whether you started off with an even or an odd number of units of air. It's barely noticeable in most caverns, but in Solar Power Generator it does cause that instantaneous flash across the cavern (just above the conveyor if I recall correctly), which can have a notable effect on the achievable score for the cavern. Getting into the granular detail - from memory - in one scenario, one of the other (fast) horizontal guardians (blue or yellow, or possibly both) higher up the screen keeps the solar beam at bay (deflecting it across the top of the cavern) during a time when the red slow one is at the edge of its platform where it might be in a position to deflect the beam, and by the time the upper guardians have cleared out of the way of the beam, the red one has just retreated back to the right so that the beam doesn't hit it. BUT in the other scenario, the red guardian is one time-frame delayed* so that for a single time-frame, as the beam comes down from above (once the faster guardians higher up have moved out of its way), it does deflect the beam leftwards for that single instant. (*Either that or it's one time-frame ahead of usual and it nips in for an instant before the upper guardians intervene higher up - I can't recall which way round it is, but the effect is the same.) The way I tried to resolve the issue in the project I was working on was to change the code so that slow horizontal guardians only move when there are an even number of air units remaining, rather than an odd number. (Or vice versa!) But that caused problems elsewhere - in one of the Kong caverns (I won't go into that right now as it's a bit off-topic).

Funny that you think of it as a plane, it looks like some kind of tractor or JCB digger to me. 🤔

Further suggestion: It would be an even more useful tool if it reverted back to yellow (or some other colour) after it leaves Willy's sprite - this allows you to judge in each time-frame how much air is being sapped, depending on whether Willy is spanning two or three cell-columns for each instance that he is in the beam. Which helps if you're trying to optimise/minimise the score loss due to a close encounter with the beam. 🙂

It's nice to see from the screenshots that the item in Swimming Pool (auto-collected upon entry in the original JSW) is visible in this version. 🙂

My interpretation was that those random flashing block at the bottom right represented bits of debris that had come off the plane upon impact. And of course the front half of the plane can be seen in the room below (Under the Roof) - with the propellors and nose of the plane intact, which rather shoots my above theory down in flames!! 😆

There's a joke in there about having not seen so many Willies on one screen at the same time since... [feel free to add a punchline] Anyway, Merry Christmas everybody!

You've got it. The J is the hook that the key is hanging off, the end of the key is S-shaped, and the top of the pair of cyan Fire cells (a stool of some sort?) together form a W. Next question is: why is there a key when there isn't actually a door in the door frame?! 😄

Two out of three. Status bar doesn't count. There's an 's' somewhere within the playing area.

I've just been watching Danny's JSW Central Youtube recording of Jet Set Mini. Well done on completing the game by 8am in-game time, Danny! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuorIPdVyYQ There are so many little special and novel features in the game (implemented via Geoff's Patch Vector system) that I'd forgotten all about! Such as the dripping tap in the Bathroom; the 'oscillating arrow' in the Hall; the first ever appearance of an 'invalid rope' in the Overgrown MegaTree; the 'ropes that aren't ropes' in the West Wall; a crumbly ramp on the Beach; animated Fire cells in the Conservatory Roof (those little gremlins - as per my profile picture - which get angry when Willy steals their beers!); the intermittent drilling noise in the Tool Shed; the way that the sun appears to come in and out on the Beach (as the whole room's BRIGHTness settings are toggled on and off now and again). Unfortunately, Maria's occasional appearance in 'At the Beach' - as a nautical figurehead attached to the prow of Willy's yacht, overhanging the edge of the beach - doesn't occur in Danny's recording. (It's a pseudo-random event when you walk into the room as to whether or not she appears; it doesn't affect the gameplay though.) See attached screenshot below. Mind you, it's not the only appearance (beyond her usual setting in the Master Bedroom) that Maria makes during the course of the game... Something else which doesn't get showcased in Danny's recording is the changing room name for the Attic room (it alternates between 'A 'Bug' in the Attic' and 'Problematic Attic' each time you enter the room). However, Danny's video displays one of those names, whilst the screenshot of the room in the entry for Jet Set Mini at jswcentral.org shows the alternative name. Which is nice (although, whilst serendipitous, I doubt that this was an intentional decision on Danny's part!) Also on the subject of the Attic room in Jet Set Mini, there's something very odd about that conveyor (behaviour which is not shown in Danny's walkthrough as it isn't essential to use the conveyor to complete the game). It's worth having a play around on that 'Problemattic' conveyor (jumping onto various parts of it, from various heights; trying to land and walk along it versus doing a 'landing jump') - I'm not entirely sure any more how I implemented it, although I seem to recall it has similar characteristics with the spider web in the East Bedroom that slows down Willy's progress when he tries to walk through it... EDIT: It might assist with investigating the Attic conveyor if I point out that the X-O-R keypress combo works in this room, to apply a XOR command to reverse the direction of flow of the conveyor.

Can anyone spot the initials J, S and W in this screenshot from the Back Door of Willy's downsized mansion?

Perhaps Robin did that just to make the game run faster? Fewer lives means the program spends less time executing the animation of the remaining lives on the status bar. (Plus in Geoff Mode, they're animated out of sync; perhaps sorting that out slows the game even more than in original JSW where the remaining lives are all in lock-step?)

Danny, did you not mean to say there that you had moved those (MM-themed) games to Section A of the 'Other game engines' section? Section B is for JSW-themed games with a new engine?

Unless I've missed it, nobody on here has yet mentioned the sad news that Clive Sinclair, inventor of the ZX Spectrum amongst many other things, passed away the other day. RIP Clive.

Known in the trade as an example of an 'Innocent-Looking Block', I believe?

Indeed, it hadn't occurred to me before but some details like the conveyors are in exactly the same place (and run in the same direction). So where I had thought that, for example, the conveyor in The VAT was cunning placed to trap an uncareful Willy, it is actually the room elements surrounding the conveyor that have been cunningly placed (the overhead wall/crumblies underneath the conveyor/Fire cell on the conveyor to the left) around the pre-existing conveyor.

Indeed, I got a bass guitar for my birthday this year, so a lot of my spare time has been spent plucking and twanging!

I think it's more accurate to say that both Ligan's 'The Collapsed Plains' and Norman Sword's 'Mercinary Kongs...' use the graphics from 'The Menagerie' in original Manic Miner. EDIT: I see that Norman Sword has just made essentially the same point and our posts have crossed. And this cavern is different from the 19 other new caverns in M40M in the sense that all the other new caverns retain the cavern names from Ligan's game, whereas this one has an entirely new name.

Having compared and contrasted the screenshots for Ligan's 'Back to the Mine' and 'Manic 40 Miner', I noticed that one of Ligan's caverns ('The Collapsed Plains' - the equivalent of the 'ostrich' cavern in original MM) was replaced entirely in 'Manic 40 Miner', by the new cavern 'Mercinary-Kongs on Hire Perches '. Danny, perhaps you might want to amend the entry in jswcentral to reflect this point? Incidentally, that cavern name is a partial play on words, based on the phrase 'hire purchase' - which perhaps isn't a familiar phrase to those for whom English isn't their first language? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hire_purchase I think the pun would have worked better if the cavern name was 'Mercinary-Kongs on Higher Perches', to reflect the height of the perches upon which the Kongs are sat? (But I guess that runs up against the 32 character limit for a cavern name (unless you omit the hyphen?) **** A couple of other points which occurred to me during playtesting: - The VAT was more difficult in Ligan's original variant, due to the opposite direction of the conveyor meaning that Willy could get stuck if his head hit the overhead solid blocks (thus stalling his 'upstream' progression, leaving the only way out to commit kamikaze against the top-left Fire cell); - The placement of the item near the portal in Ligan's version of 'The Art Gallery' (which would have been 'The Bank' in old money!) - or rather, the absence of that item in Norman Sword's version - means that the route through this cavern is quite different. (In the latter, you don't have to ascend the 'trellis' - although Danny did take the trellis route in his walkthrough of Manic 40 Miner.)

Ah, I just watched Danny's Youtube walkthrough, and it seems that I made things much more difficult for myself than I needed to! Danny's jump at 20:17 in his video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtg3BnujmEE), launching himself off the conveyor to get past the Fire cells which are situated on the conveyor, meant that the entire upper crumbly platform was available to him for his escape after collecting the bottom-right item. The way I did it (after multiple attempts using roll-back) was to jump over the pair of conveyor Fire cells from off the solid (magenta) floor platform above the conveyor (and just to the left of the pair of Fire cells) - a jump which itself needed to be well-timed to avoid hitting the cyan penguin - landing on the upper crumbly platform but making sure not to land on the right-hand crumbly cell of that two-block platform, then dropping down (through the lower crumbly platform) to get the item. Then jumping vertically up onto the conveyor, from there Willy can't go left as the conveyor stops him [can't jump leftwards onto the conveyor to counter that, as Willy would hit the moneybag Fire cell], then jump rightwards onto the one remaining crumbly cell (beneath the 'urn' Fire cell), and then (with a very short time limit due to the crumbly nature of the platform upon which he stands) try to jump leftwards over the pair of conveyor Fire cells but under the penguin (which is both fast-moving and has a very limited horizontal range). Very tricky indeed! To see what I'm on about, please see the attached snapshot file, taken (with the game paused) just after Willy has made the fateful jump off the magenta platform above the conveyor. If you load up the snapshot file and press any movement key to resume the game, your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to try and collect the bottom-right item (the one underneath the conveyor) and then make your way safely back up onto the magenta platform which Willy had just jumped off at the moment when I saved the snapshot. Extremely tricky, but I did manage to do it after many attempts! P.S. If Norman ever wanted to create a super-hard version of this game/this cavern, then the tricky jump described above (as opposed to the easier method which Danny executed in his Youtube video) could be enforced by placing another Fire cell on the conveyor, just to the left of the existing pair of Fire cells on the conveyor. Pronce's Palace snapshot.z80

I believe that the above (problem Danny reported in 'Pronces Palace'; now fixed) was being caused by the attributes for the solid wall blocks matching the attributes for some of the Fire cells (the spiky bushes, as well as the money bags and the 'urn' to the right of the cyan penguin. Incidentally, I found collecting the bottom-right item (and escaping afterwards) to be very tricky, due to a combination of the cyan penguin, the money bag, the urn, the spiky bushes, the right-moving conveyor and the crumbly platforms. Firstly, you have to make sure not to crumble all of the upper of the two crumbly platforms on your way down to collect the item. And secondly, a well-timed, pixel-perfect jump from the remaining crumbly platform, underneath the penguin, is required to escape from that corner. A very cunning design for what initially appears to be a relatively simple task! Oh, and on a technical level, there is something else which I just noticed in this cavern - the switches work differently than in original MM. Rather than the left-hand one opening the wall and the right-hand one flipping Kong, here it is the first switch to be flipped (whichever one you choose to touch first) which opens the wall, whilst the second switch causes Kong to tumble. 🙂