IRF

The rotate effect is nice, and I appreciate the addition of the H and J keys to activate it. The ability to swap between black/blue using ENTER is also a nice touch. I know you said you weren't planning on making any further changes, but I have a suggestion anyway... Could the air supply in the cavern be made to drain at twice the rate if the background colour is set to blue? That way the player can choose to navigate in the easier climate of the blue background, but there is a reward (in terms of additional points at the end of the cavern) for the brave who venture forth into the dark...

Would it be a relatively easy task to add H and J as alternative keys for the task? I tend to play using my right hand for moving Willy [didn't think I'd manage to come up with a fresh double entendre for this genre all these years later but there you go!], using O and P for left/right and Space for jump. Trying to press K and L with my left hand simultaneously is a bit awkward. H and J would be easier, and still within the same half-row of keys.

Black Void is interesting/tricky - can't even see Willy unless you look up or down!

Was that the .tap.tap label you're referring to? I did wonder about that; luckily it didn't stop the file from working though.

'L' to look up and 'K' to look down?

The new and improved, brighter torch is particularly impressive in the caverns with non-black background (air PAPER) settings. :)

The ghosts are from Pac Man, to match the Pac Man style guardians. The item shapes are supposed to be bunches of cherries too I think, to match the theme.

We used several of the Tech Ted sprites in the jswmm.co.uk project 'Jet Set Mini'.

On a sort of similar theme, in the jswmm.co.uk release 'Manic Mixup', all the items in the Solar Power Generator cavern are shaped like sunglasses, and once you have collected them all, the solar beam (with its air supply-sapping power) is turned off - there's a kind of logic to that!

I think removing one earth cell would do it - namely the one which is directly above the two earth cells that open up when the first switch is triggered. It might look a bit odd with the gap present from the start, so perhaps opening up the wall via the switch could also cause the removal of a third wall block as well, by tweaking the special Kong routine?

The portals in the Kong caverns are unavoidably "in the way" - i.e. it's impossible to collect all the items without passing through the portal en route. So those layouts would need to be changed, in order to allow you to avoid entering the portal prematurely if it's fatal to do so!

Here's a suggestion - once Willy completes The Final Barrier, the whole cavern should be lit up 'properly', representing the daylight flooding into the cavern through the open portal. (i.e. the 'dark light' effect is switched off at that moment).

I think the sliding bonus routine is worth adding even if there are no bugs. It's a genuine novelty, as far as I am aware, and a suitable reward for the player managing not to lose any lives. :ph34r:

I presume those are bonus points added at the end of the game for each remaining life? (As opposed to scores you have to accrue to gain an extra life.)

The effect I referred to above can be seen in the first cavern of the two attached test files (same engine change applied in both files; the only difference is that the INK and PAPER settings of the crumbly cells are swapped round, which gives a slightly different visual effect). I think it makes it a bit more obvious for the player what they have to do in order to 'mine' out the items so that they can be collected. Embedded Items Merged with Background 1.TAP Embedded Items Merged with Background 2.TAP

Is a life still awarded for collecting 10,000 points? (If indeed it is even possible to collect that number of points, given that the game doesn't go back to the start after the Final Barrier, so there's a maximum theoretical number of points available.)

I should say that I had to sacrifice a life in 'Attack of the Mutant Telephones', because I went round and then realised that I had left one item uncollected which I couldn't then reach in order to complete the cavern. I had been playtesting on QAOP which seems to preserve only the most recent rollback point, and I had used rollback at a point in Mutant Telephones which was 'past the point of no return'. So whilst elsewhere I managed to complete the screens without loss of life via Rollback, in the Telephones cavern I wasted a life. The upshot of this is that my final score will be slightly inflated by the fact that I collected all the items in Mutant Telephones twice (bar the one item which I couldn't reach first time round). It would be possible to inflate the completion score more significantly, if you triggered Kong falling in one of the Kong screens (and collected all the items) and then sacrificed a life before reaching the portal - and if you did that for all of your lives bar the last one. Idea: It might be possible to avoid that scenario if you could 'roll back' the accrued score every time you lost a life to the score which you had upon entry to the current cavern. That way, the final score would truly represent how efficiently you completed the game, and it would not be skewed by losing lives and partially repeating caverns.

Completed the latest version in Expert mode. Better score than last time. :) I presume the bonus points available for making the red UFO fall on the final screen are fewer than for the Kongs, because the UFO doesn't descend as far from its initial position?

Andy, please re-download the 'Gloomy Cavern' snapshot (from the post three above this one), as I've edited it again to fix a problem.

The area immediately in front of Willy is illuminated by his headtorch, so appears as normal (conveyor green, Central Cavern guardian yellow, etc). Whilst the rest of the cavern (that isn't directly in Willy's field of vision) is gloomy and only visible in non-BRIGHT blue INK on a black PAPER background. It makes the game a bit easier because you can see where the guardians are, but it still adds more difficulty compared with the original MM, because it's harder to distinguish the crumbly platforms from the solid ones, and the portal only FLASHes when Willy is in close proximity to it. EDIT: I've just noticed that not everything is right though - in 'Attack of the Mutant Telephones', the wall/ceiling [and portal] at the top left doesn't stay visible in gloomy blue INK. :unsure:

One more POKEs seem to do the trick! Try POKE #9378, #01 (or POKE 37752,1 in the antiquated decimal system). Like Norman Sword's POKE, this should be applicable to both the Bug-Byte and Software Projects variants of the game. If you only apply the above POKE, the cavern is revealed as you explore, but then the parts you have seen stay revealed. In conjuction with Norman's POKE (#9365,#70 or 37733,112), the whole cavern is shown in black PAPER / blue INK throughout, except the cells in close proximity to Willy at any given time, which are revealed in their 'proper' colours whilst he is nearby. EDIT: Both of the above POKES are applied in the attached snapshot. Makes things a bit easier! FURTHER EDIT: Following discovery of additional glitches, it turns out that eight more POKES are needed to completely implement the alternative 'gloomy cavern' effect (so that's ten in total): POKE #9417, #01 POKE #941E, #01 POKE #9421, #01 POKE #9424, #01 POKE #9427, #01 POKE #942E, #01 POKE #9435, #01 POKE #943C, #01 I don't pretend to completely understand how this works! :blush: :D Gloomy Cavern.sna

Making full use of Matthew's original tune data: The original Manic Miner title screen tune consists of pairs of note pitch values (alongside a duration byte). In most cases, the pitch values just differ by a value of 1, which yields a 'slightly dischordant' note of around that pitch. But there are a few pairs of pitch values which differ by a significant amount, to yield a 'chord' of two distinct notes played together. In Andrew Broad's MM->JSW conversion (which I only subjected to minor tweaks in the file that I previously uploaded, unlike my more substantial intervention with the JSW->MM conversion's tune), Andrew took all of the first pitch values for each pair of notes, and put them through the 'octave-shift modulation' effect from the JSW game engine. In the attached file 'The Blue Danube in JSW style - Alternative notes', I have gone through all the notes in the title tune, identified where there is a 'chord' in the original Manic Miner 'Blue Danube' score (pairs of pitch values which differ by a larger value than 1), and used the 'alternative' note pitch value (i.e. the second value in the pair, as listed in the original MM score). For example, the first phrase of the Blue Danube (as originally scored by Matthew, for the MM game engine) is comprised of the following pairs of pitch values (these are in hexadecimal; I have omitted the duration bytes for clarity): 80 81 66 67 56 57 56 57 AB CB 2B 33 2B 33 AB CB 33 40 33 40 AB CB The equivalent data for the rendition of Blue Danube in the JSW engine, as can be heard in Andrew's MM->JSW conversion, consists of a single pitch for each note, as follows: 80 81 66 67 56 57 56 57 AB CB 2B 33 2B 33 AB CB 33 40 33 40 AB CB In the attached 'Alternative notes' file, I used the following values: 80* 81 66 67 56 57 56 57 AB CB 2B 33 2B 33 AB CB 33 40 33 40 AB CB (*In both 'The Blue Danube in JSW style' and 'The Blue Danube in JSW style - Alternative notes' files, I actually used a value '00' for the very first note - Bottom C instead of Middle C - to try and replicate the way in which the tune starts off slowly in original MM. Since it isn't possible to specify notes of different duration in the JSW engine, that seemed the best way to try and achieve a similar effect.) ** It would be good to try and play both title tunes from the two files simultaneously, if that were possible with two emulators running at the same time - you would end up with a title tune that has the character of both the MM and the JSW theme tunes! (i.e. chords punctuating the tune, and the doubling-octave modulation.) The Blue Danube in JSW style - Alternative notes.TAP

Once properly executed, Norman Sword's tweak to Pgyuri's original idea should give the right level of added difficulty without making the caverns pseudo-impossible. e.g. With everything highlighted in blue INK on black PAPER, you'll be able to track the movements of guardians, but the distinction between solid and crumbly platforms will be less obvious until you are on top of them (with the crumbly ones crumbling away!) **** I wonder how difficult would it be to make the Solar Power Generator a special case cavern, with the solar beam being visible throughout with a 'highlighted' zone either side of the solar beam similar to the lit up area in front of Willy?

I take it that comment was in response to the initial file by Pgyuri? Norman Sword has attempted to create a more playable version (see attachments three posts above this one), which have a 'gloomy but still visible cavern' effect. However, that effect doesn't sustain itself for the duration whilst you try to play through the cavern, so I think that it needs another tweak. (I'm sure Norman will come up with something in about five minutes after he's read this. :) )