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Ah, that item you're referring to is in an 'odd' column number, so nothing is printed there for a Willy sprite in its leftmost frame of animation. (Well, technically the value #00 is written there, but that's what was already there anyway as it's an air cell in a room with a black background, so nothing changes in that cell and the item remains collectable. Try setting the dancing lives to a different animation frame and I think you'll find that it's uncollectable.) Conversely, the auto-collected item in Kong Beast is in an 'even' column, and it's actually one of the spare Willy's front foot which 'collects' it - the byte value for his feet in that position is #77, the first 7 represents his back foot, the second digit is his front foot, and that 7 is interpreted as white INK in the attribute buffer!

When Willy falls off the bottom of a cavern (or jumps up past the top), the corruption happens to the data of certain caverns, so you would have to reload the game file to reset it. (Same with the Attic Bug in JSW.) The spare lives overspill is happening in the buffers, so it's not permanent. If you lose some lives, then it will start to become undone (the errant blocks will retreat from right to left across the screen.)

That puzzled me at first - why not completable with 40 to 46 lives? - but I see what you mean now. Willy can't progress upstream all the way along the conveyor, because he has to drop down onto it from above due to the short wall/Fire cell* combo that sit on the conveyor. But at 47 lives, the conveyor itself is corrupted along its whole length into being comprised of floor cells. (Incidentally, if that Fire cell wasn't there, you could make it back to the right-hand end of the conveyor with a well-timed jump whilst walking upstream along the conveyor, but you have to make the jump pixel-perfect in order to pass through the corner of, and thus into, the first wall block.) Of course, doing that in itself causes corruption of some of the caverns, when the game engine tries to draw the playable Willy sprite extending beyond the bottom of the screen! ** Top-notch research, DigitalDuck!

So you could envisage a scenario where progress relies on turning the music back on to make a block change from a lethal Fire cell to a 'standonable' floor block! The on/off status of the in-game music being an inherent part of the gameplay would be another novelty!

True! It occurred to me just after I posed the question that, whilst perhaps slightly novel, it wouldn't present any additional difficulty to the cavern, because the player would (for a 'standard' Kong-style cavern) have to pass through there anyway. However, musing on it a bit further, I think I have thought of a possible cunning use for it... I feel another quirky one-cavern puzzle might be in the works...

That comment has just inspired me to wonder - has there ever been a MM game with a Kong cavern where an item is embedded within the collapsing wall, and therefore only collectable after the first switch has been tripped? 🤔

Even curiouser - if the item in AUW is collectable (ie. by Willy when he passes through it, not auto-collected as soon as Willy enters, like the glass in JSW's The Swimming Pool), that suggests the glitch is just a visual effect, not affecting the gameplay. (An item embedded in a genuine non-Air block is either uncollectable, or auto-collected if the block happens to have white INK. EDIT: or collectable if it's within a crumbly block but only once that block has been completely crumbled away by Willy standing on it.) Yet in terms of Willy's ability to stand on the errant blocks, it's seemingly more than just a visual artefact and it does affect the gameplay! ** A couple of additional thoughts that I had: (1) These rogue blocks created by the spare lives overspilling are analogous with some Invalid Arrow effects in Jet Set Willy. (Is there a separate topic discussing Invalid Arrows somewhere here on JSWMM?); (2) You said that the errant blocks manifested themselves as fire cells in Skylab Landing Bay, making that cavern impassable. But did you try teleporting beyond there (using 6031769), to see what might happen beyond that? If the bonus lives continue to accrue, then new gameplay possibilities might open up (even quicker routes/shortcuts), as the extra blocks continue to build rightwards... Although if they stretch across the whole screen, they might make it impossible to descend a cavern from top to bottom? (Unless of course they manifest as crumbly blocks!?) They might also block progress if they appear as solid wall/earth blocks...or may spice things up if they turn out as (non-animated) conveyor cells! (The exact behaviour depends on the assigned attributes for each block type in each cavern, and whether or not there is a match - floor/water tiles being the default if there's no match.) The errant blocks shouldn't collide with any guardians (since such collisions are pixel-based), but they might conceivably trigger rapid air loss in the Solar cavern when the solar beam passes through them? Finally, what happens when the blocks created by the bonus lives go past the right-hand side of the cavern? Do they start to fill the next character row down, or do they then start to corrupt the pixel buffer? (Now that COULD cause a guardian collision!) ** Sorry, that turned out to be a lot more than "a couple of additional thoughts"!!! 🤣

Okay, I've just seen the caveat at the start of your video. (EDIT: This post crossed over with DD's latest reply.) On that basis, whilst it's a very interesting and quirky experiment, I don't think it should form the basis of an update to the ranking table? As you suggest, it isn't something that can be achieved in the High Score Challenge, because it relies on the player having completed all 20 caverns several times through beforehand! Which isn't something you can do in the HSC; you just pick a cavern and play it (slowing your score for that cavern easily to be seen, since you start off with 000000) Also, the high scores in the table at the start of this thread should serve as a target for the average (good) player to aspire to. I don't think activating this bug is within the bounds of normal/sane gameplay! Plus the precise outworkings of the bug may be somewhat predictable. In one cavern during your experiment, an errant extra life auto-collected an item (presumably because the INK in the host character space was rendered in white). But in other circumstances, a non-white INK attribute might get printed over an item, making it uncollectable!? Those are just my personal musings; ultimately it's Andy (Spider)'s call as to whether to update the high score table, since it's his project.

Wow! Did you actually play far enough without losing lives to gain enough extra lives to spill over onto the playing area, or did you POKE the remaining lives to a high number and start from there? Anyway, I'm confident now that I won't need to update my forthcoming project again like I did have to do for The Endorian Forest.

If the above statement is correct (quoted from the first post of this thread), then I can't think how you managed to achieve a higher score in that (or any other) cavern of the BB* version than you can in the High Score Challenge version!? (*The HSC is based on BB, so it is possible to achieve one extra point in the SP version's 'The Warehouse', because the different sprites there means that Willy can sneak past the last one, one time-frame sooner. But that doesn't apply to 'Abandoned Uranium Workings'.)

Intriguing... I would say that if it involved the use of some quirky feature of the existing game engine, then it should count. But if you used a POKE of some sort, then it shouldn't.

Maybe he's a fisherman, and in the spirit of Matthew's double entendres, it's called 'Willy's Big Tackle'. 😜

But then if Willy's first adventure was set on a chain of islands, it wouldn't have been called 'Manic Miner'! It would have been 'Willy the Island Hopper' or something, and he would be wearing a sunhat or visor instead of a miner's helmet.

Wow! That's quite a lengthy discussion I initiated! Or perhaps - in the spirit of the double entendre inherent in the Willy game - a 'mass debate'! 😜 Another example is 'Head Over Heels', which starts off linear but then once you reach the Moon base, you can decide which of four worlds to teleport down to and complete first. Then once you've finished all four planets, the ending reverts back to linear. I could talk all day about 'Head Over Heels', it's fantastic! But I would probably veer off-topic. One thing I'm fairly certain of is that the term 'cavern' doesn't really apply to an outdoor setting, like Deserted Isle!

Isn't 'level' more of a reference to the degree of difficulty (in e.g. Manic Mixup, once you've completed all the caverns the first time through, the difficulty moves up a level and you go through them all the second time)?

I suppose I should have said (and I think it's what I meant) that a cavern's only means of exit is via a portal. In the JSW context, "level" could be considered as a reference to which floor of the mansion each room is on. (Battlements on the top level; Wine Cellar on the bottom level.) Edit: With apologies to the Watchtower and the Entrance to Hades!

I should just add that, notwithstanding the name 'Eugene Lair', this cavern is more like a hybrid, conceptually speaking, of two original Manic Miner caverns: - 'The Final Barrier' (aesthetically speaking, with the action all taking place in the bottom half of the playing area - although a strategically-placed pair of dancing pixels give the appearance of moving eyeballs to the [otherwise static] giant 'Eugene' printed at the top of the screen); and - 'Skylab Landing Bay' - the fireballs are a very inventive and fiendishly tricky variation on Matthew's original Skylabs (they appear to be ascending rather than descending, and for most of their traverse they are INKless). The version of the cavern which ended up in the official release of 'Ultimate Manic Miner' (with the 'Skylab' fireballs staying in their columns and not getting horizontally displaced, due to a flaw in the JSW64 game engine) really didn't do Igor Makovsky's original design justice. Hence I was so determined to fix it! For all of the above reasons, I really recommend people try out 'Eugene Lair as Manufacturer Intended' (via the above method, taking one of Danny's recordings as a starting point and 'seizing control' of the gameplay), even if they don't fancy traversing through the rest of 'Ultimate Manic Miner' to reach it.

Waiting around too long can have two potential consequences: you might get hit by a fireball flare-up, but even if you manage to avoid that, if you crumble away all the cyan platforms near the portal, you may end up stranded on the lower level, with the flashing portal beyond reach! In fact, I thought you had made that mistake in one of your recordings (but it turned out that there was one crumbly cell with a pixel-row or two remaining, just within reach of the portal, so you managed to sneak out of there!) ** Another unexpected difficulty can arise from the 'shadow' of the Skylabs passing over a column shortly before the deadly fireball arrives in that column. It can provide a helpful warning to take swift evasive action, as it briefly turns Willy's sprite yellow in advance of the deadly yellow pixels bursting out. But it can also make items temporarily uncollectable, if you try to jump up to collect them just at the moment that the yellow shadow passes through them and Willy! (Willy needs to have white INK in order to collect items.) It happened to me once, so I had to go back and try again for the item in question. Deliciously frustrating!

Well done, Danny! I agree, the sense of panic is only increased if you don't have Rollback to rely on! I think I did manage to do it once though (eventually!) Because these are RZX recordings, I would suggest anyone who wants to have a go at this fiendish cavern 'as author intended', all they need to do is: - load up one of the recordings in SPIN; - once the gameplay starts, select 'Stop Playback' from the 'Recording' drop-down menu at the top of the emulator window; - walk Willy leftwards into the portal of the start-up room (if that hasn't already happened by the time you stop the playback) ; - emerge from the portal into 'Eugene Lair', and BEWARE THE FIREBALLS!!! 😜

Sorry, I should have said 'The Mine Vehicle Department' there, not the MM Pub.

Good point about who entered the room. Though I guess you could have said "... after he entered the room [or cavern]". The player isn't really entering the room themself, just guiding Willy into and through there! To me, the distinction between rooms and caverns is that the latter have a portal for egress.

Danny, your entry at JSWCentral.org for JSW64: Manic Miner includes the following: "The game contains only the rooms from the original MM and plays almost exactly like the original. A visible difference is e.g. 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." However, on the basis of this topic's discussion, that isn't necessarily always the case. If the player was up against the right-hand wall of The Warehouse when they entered that cavern's portal - especially if they were facing that wall at the time they made the vertical jump into the portal - then they would NOT be able to perform that early jump and get ahead in Amoebatron's Revenge! Without going into too much detail in your entry, perhaps it would be more accurate if it was worded something along the lines of this?: "The game contains only the rooms from the original MM and plays almost exactly like the original. A visible difference is e.g. the ability, in some circumstances, 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." (I'll let the references to 'rooms' instead of 'caverns' slip!)

Do you want me to DM you a copy of the fixed gamefile, with the starting room/position set to the appropriate place?

I wonder if all the other 'tributees' are aware of their 8-bit representation in the Manic Miner Pub in UMM?

At the very least, will you consider doing a play test of the UMM room 'Eugene Lair' with my Pokes applied (so it's 'as manufacturer intended')? Maybe you could upload it here at JSWMM if you don't think it belongs on your YouTube channel? *** Incidentally, your walkthrough doesn't display a couple of 'Easter Egg' rooms in UMM which it isn't necessary to visit in order to complete the game (namely 'Manic Miner Pub' and 'The Mine Vehicle Department'). The latter of which contains a personal tribute (in the form of labelled sprites) to several of the 'old skool' people from the MM & JSW scene, including yourself! (Unless there is another 'Danny' on the scene?)