IRF

I clearly failed to carry out a final inspection which would have revealed that fact.

If the Under the Drive 'Dalek' sets off leftwards from near the right-hand side, might it be possible to clear both the guardian and the Fire cell in a single jump sometimes?

A combination of the music being off in RB's video (and on in your recording), with the fact that RB played some of the game with fewer remaining lives, could add up to explain the difference?

I've got so used to playing with the Conservatory Roof bug fixed (so that you don't have to lose a life to collect any of the items) that I'd forgotten about that feature of the original game!

You get seven spare lives in JSW, so you could implement a 'deathwarp' in all seven of those rooms (leaving no dancing Willies on the status bar to slow down the game towards the end). Though I guess you want to keep one spare in case of 'accidents'! Jumping up from near the top of the ramp in First Landing into Top Landing is a good way to expire several lives in quick succession (with the advancing Swiss Army Knife), though you have to be careful with the positioning so that you can escape with a vertical jump once you're down to your last life (if you're too close to the Swiss Army Knife when you pop up into Top Landing then you're in an inescapable Infinite Death Scenario!)

Speedrunning seems to be a fundamentally different cultural way to play JSW, involving a different mindset, compared with what I'm accustomed to! But getting into the spirit, would it not be an interesting tactic to deliberately sacrifice all of Willy's lives (bar his last one) at the very start of the game? So that the game doesn't have to process drawing any remaining lives on the status bar from that point onwards. (Of course, you'd need to be sure not to get killed again after that point!) Thinking about Manic Miner, different aspects may be in play. Do you still go by the Real World timings, given that the final score is a more precise reflection of how quickly you completed all the caverns (based on air supply which saps in more discrete doses, compared with the minutes occasionally ticking over in JSW)? Actually, I've just thought of something else - do you deliberately NOT collect the bonus points for making King fall off his perch when you're speedrunning MM? Not just because it could be considered an unnecessary diversion if reaching the Final Barrier as quickly as possible is your only concern, but also because collecting the bonus points for dislodging Kong actually brings forward the point where you win a bonus life - which has the inadvertent consequence of slowing down the game sooner (due to the program having to draw an extra life earlier)?

I doubt that your Youtube videos are running at different speeds, so it must have been the case that your emulators (or Danny's emulator versus RB's real Spectrum?) were running at slightly different speeds. Which suggests that the best way to speed up 'real world' completion times is to run the emulator faster. 🤪 But more seriously, the most consistent way of judging the completion times is to go by the time on the status bar clock display. (I would add - you could pause the game just before Willy reaches the toilet, and PEEK at the value of the internal 'game tick' counter at #85CB, if you ever had a 'photo finish' situation e.g. two people claim a completion time of 7:56am and you want to establish who had in fact got there first.)

Musing out loud: I wonder whether the random start position of ropes might mean that if Willy drops into a room from above (e.g. from the Orangery to the Swimming Pool), from what would 'traditionally' be a safe position, Willy might instead drop a fatal distance without being caught by the rope? (But only perhaps once, as the random new position of the rope should mean that his next life gets safely caught.)

DEC HL?

I wonder if the problem (now fixed) arose because you numbered The Off Licence as Room 1 rather than Room 0?

Something like the Human Centipede from the movies? That's some 'Attic Bug'! 😜

I've just realised the purpose behind the INC instruction - it's so that B isn't assigned a value of zero going into the start of the DJNZ loop (otherwise the loop would be executed 256 times, slowing the process down).

Nice one Norman! Offset #8E in JSW is in the middle of the room name, but there are plenty of other unused offset bytes (such as #DF). I notice that in this sequence: INC B LD B,A The INC B appears to be redundant as B is immediately overwritten by A... should it be an INC A?

Ah, I get what you mean now, Norman Sword. It's more efficient with the Guardian Classes to use several instances of a single Guardian Class in The Attic, and adjust each of them vertically when building the room before Willy enters (to create the sinuous shape of the Centipede/Bug/whatever), rather than using difference Guardian Classes for each segment.

Question: shouldn't that be the other way round for the Attic Centipede? i.e. the horizontal position of each segment is fixed, whilst the vertical position varies?

(For the unfamiliar, IDS = Infinite Death Scenario.) RB's idea wouldn't necessarily set up an IDS if Willy entered a room at a point where a guardian started its path, because after losing a life and the room being refreshed, the random start position of that guardian would most likely be somewhere else (whilst Willy's start position in the room would remain the same). One possible scenario you might get in, say, Forgotten Abbey, could be two monks in sync directly above/below each other, and remaining that way (assuming their horizontal trajectories are of the same width), making it impossible to jump over the lower one without Willy's head hitting the upper one's legs! But if you walked out of the room and back again, they would reset to different start positions so the problem would be resolved.

Danny, I presume the references to COPYRIGHT and COPYCARD in your last substantive post are interchangeable? 😉

The above reference to six from your original post is what I was querying.

Well done Danny on your hard work creating this major update to JSWCentral! I have a couple of queries: - In your post above, you mentioned six JSW variations by JODI, but then you listed either five variations (if you were referring to the game files which merit inclusion in the new subsection C of the list of JSW games), or eight variations (if you were including the three 'minor mods' in the total). So your reference to six variations should have said either five, ,or eight? - You've provided a link to the new main page of JSWCentral dedicated to the JONI project, but I can't see a way that one can navigate to access that page from anywhere within the website, without being given the Hyperlink as you have included here above? Should there be a link from the 'Authors about their games' page of the site? (Although I realise that it doesn't quite belong in there, as the generic article about the JODI project wasn't written by the authors themselves.)

Did you manage to beat your previous completion time for the WRITETYPER challenge, RB?

Of course I meant lamb chops, not shops! 🤪 Penguins have plumage as well, but they plummet too!

Or better still, modify the sprite in JSWED to make them Skylambs! (Full lambs as they're falling, crumbling into a lamb shop shape on contact with the platforms?)

Monty Python once did a sketch about flying sheep, "labouring under the misapprehension that they're birds". Featured the classic line: "Note how they do not so much fly, as plummet." Considering the obvious influence that Python had on Matthew Smith's work (e.g. the descending foot squashing Willy at the end of the game), it wouldn't have been unreasonable to assume that Skylambs might make an appearance...

Sorry, I didn't see that query as it went 'over the page' from your previous one. I haven't seen 'American Psycho', so I'm afraid I can't confirm what you say. I would hazard a guess that it could be a similar scenario, except that I don't imagine the line in 'American Psycho' is said with the same comedic flourish!

Sorry, it's a Birmingham (and surrounding area) accent.