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Good stuff Norman, although there is a quirky thing going on whereby the cells behind Willy are drawn in black INK, meaning that you can move around progressively 'erasing' the cavern as you go - see the attached recording. By the time Willy reaches the portal at the end of the Central Cavern, the whole cavern has reverted back to how it is in the 'Dark Light Modification', and your initial 'gloomy blue cavern' effect has been erased! Erase the Cavern.rzx

I note that '6031769'* works, so you can easily access/explore all the caverns - including the ones with non-black PAPER air/backgrounds. :-) (*In the Bug-Byte version; presumably TYPEWRITER also works in the Software Projects variant although I haven't tried that.) I did wonder whether more of the cavern might get illuminated in the Solar Power Generator, because of the Solar beam. But it seems not.

One suggestion - for consistency, shouldn't the Descending Boot on the Game Over screen suddenly appear above Willy's head the moment before impact (rather than the player being able to see the full trail of the extended leg)? Also, maybe everything should go black shortly after he's been squashed? - representing his lamp being snuffed out! :lol:

That's a cool effect, and very in keeping with the 'mining' theme! It took me seven lives just to complete the Central Cavern! I found that dropping off the centrally-placed brick wall onto the conveyor, and then pressing (and keeping) the Right movement key to hold Willy in place whilst waiting for the yellow robot to appear, gives you an extra cell of 'forward vision', and that helped to get the timing of the jump over the robot right. Most of my lives were expended trying to remember exactly where the overhead stalactites, poisonous pansies and underfoot crumbly cells are on the top platform. I'd say that without a good advance knowledge/mental map of where the hazards are located, this game would be extremely difficult!

Something I meant to ask before - is there a teleport/cheat function which allows you to skip to a chosen cavern? (Similar to '6031769' in the original MM). I imagine it would be useful for you to be able to go straight to the new cavern to playtest it, for example.

You have me convinced - all the more reason why it's good that the bug was spotted and rectified.

But if I understand this correctly: ... It is only the bottom three pixel-rows of the switch that can kill Willy, because only those three pixel-rows change when the switch is flipped. So in a scenario where Willy is on the descent phase of a sideways jump, and falls through the switch cell, his legs will enter the upper part of the switch first (at most, the top four pixel-rows of the switch), therefore his legs won't reach the 'switchy' part of the switch until the next time-frame of the game, when the 'flip' has already happened and the potential for a collision has passed. So the fatal collision wouldn't occur in that circumstance. (It's a purely academic point anyway now that you've fixed the bug!)

If you fell onto a switch from above, wouldn't it behave like a floor tile and arrest Willy's fall? So he would end up standing on it rather than being killed (unless he had fallen from a fatal height of course). **** Something which I meant to mention the other day - though this is a moot point now that you've fixed the problem - is that I managed to take a couple of shortcuts in the 'spiral' room by bouncing off the spiky bush nasty cells, so that I completed the screen without going all the way around the spiral (this was only possible in Trainer and Normal modes, since instant death follows contact with a nasty in Expert mode).

The Final cavern is actually an excellent example of one in which you need to collect the various items in a certain order, if you want to complete it in Expert game mode AND get the bonus points which are available!

Job done!

I knew my memory was a bit hazy! Andrew, am I right in thinking that you did interview Matthew Smith yourself, on another occasion?

I just reached the last cavern again, and this time I managed to activate both switches. Both of them can indeed kill Willy if he strikes them at the wrong angle, as suspected. But your fears about Willy being killed if the lower half of his body pixel-collides with them proved to be unfounded. I suspect that's because the check for whether Willy has touched a switch only compares the attribute coordinates of the upper half of his body with the coordinate of the switch. (If you walk through the lower switch in the final cavern by proceeding upstream along the conveyor directly beneath it, such that Willy's legs pass through the switch, the switch does not get flipped.) That final cavern is actually bloody difficult to complete this time, now that I am trying to make the 'Kong' fall to collect the bonus points AND exit the cavern safely!

My latest investigations have crossed with your last post, Norman. But I just confirmed that the second switch in the second Kong cavern can in fact kill Willy if he hits if at a certain angle. I suspect that the first switches in both Kong caverns would also, in theory, be fatal if Willy pixel-collided with them before they are flipped. But the place in which the first switches in both caverns are located means that Willy has to jump sideways at them, and from such a position that his attribute coincides with the switch (flipping it, and making it harmless) before any of his pixels (in fact, his headlamp) can collide with any pixels in the switch. So no fatal outcome there. I hadn't thought to check whether the switches in the final cavern can kill him if he pixel-collides with them.

A vertical jump if Willy is further left kills him too. Whilst I managed to do a left-to-right jump and flip the switch without dying. It seems that it's not a difference between vertical versus sideways jumping. Rather, it's a question of whether or not one of Willy's pixels touches a pixel of the switch. If he starts off facing left in the rightmost frame of animation within the pair of cell-columns bounded by the two blocks either side of the switch (see attached screenshot), then when he jumps straight up, his attribute coordinates enter the cell containing the switch, but his pixels don't touch the switch's pixels, so the switch is flipped safely. As you've discovered, once the switch has been flipped, Willy can pixel-collide with it without harm.

Norman, please see the attached. Recording of the mysterious behaviour of the right-hand switch in the first Kong cavern, as well as a snapshot taken just before the recording was made (so you can try it for yourself). What can explain the sudden death when Willy touches the switch? The first (left-hand) switch didn't kill him (obviously, or else I wouldn't have been able to reach that position in the first place to touch the second switch). Kong Switch Unexplained Death.rzx Kong Switch Unexplained Death.z80

Anyway, I'll do a recording of Willy being killed by the switch in the first Kong cavern so you can see what I mean.

Nothing to do with Kong then, but I'm still not sure why Willy is apparently killed when he touches the right-hand switch in the first Kong cavern? (In Expert mode)

Playing the Expert mode (Build 4) now. I just tried to flick the switch to kill Kong in the first Kong cavern, and died. I noticed when playing in one of the easier modes that the falling (red) Kong saps air supply if Willy touches it before it falls all the way and disappears (it falls slowly so you have time to get down from the right-hand switch to touch it, if you're quick). I think what's happening here in Expert mode is that the red Kong hits the platform upon which it has been standing (which doesn't get cleared away in time before upside-down Kong hits it), killing Willy. Change of logic from the original Manic Miner, where the falling Kong is harmless to Willy. EDIT: Although it didn't happen in the Return of Kong cavern! (As in, red Kong is still fatal to touch, so you have to wait for it to fall all the way down the big drop before dropping into the portal. But flipping the second switch to make Kong fall isn't fatal to Willy, unlike in the first Kong cavern in Expert mode.)

I read an interview with Matthew Smith (interview conducted by Dr Andrew Broad!) in which, if memory serves [tennis pun intended] correctly, Matthew said the Cold Room items were supposed to be snowshoes, but he left out a pixel [either that or the opposite - he inserted a pixel erroneously - I can't recall which], which made the items look like tennis rackets. Andrew Broad released a 2008 Remix of Manic Miner, in which the item shape for the Cold Room was tweaked, to add/delete the said pixel. I also carried that forward into the cavern 'The Big Freeze' in the jswmm.co.uk release 'Manic Mixup'.

MtM, the penny has just dropped about what you meant by this comment!: You're referring to the need to drop down onto the items from above (after you've stood on and crumbled away the crumbly cell in which each of them is embedded). I took your comment "which way you need to approach collecting" to mean that you have to take care to collect the items in a particular order (as you do in Eugene's Lair, for example, in order to be able to reach the portal in time once Angry Eugene starts descending).

Ah, I see! The 'tennis racket' item shape comes from the Cold Room, where I interpreted them as snowshoes! But magenta snow (the crumbly cells) would be a most unusual phenomenon! Yes, I believe Andrew Broad is a tennis afficionado.

Very weird effect when I tried to pause the game - all the pixels drifted rightwards off the edge of the screen!! :wacko:

Is it the Menagerie, or is it the Cold Room? (This screen in 'Manic Panic' combines those two original caverns into one!)

Weirdly, I just completed the Normal mode of 'Manic Panic', and the screen I was referring to before - the one with load of purple crumbly cells, some of which have collectable items embedded in them, and the multiple 'blinking eye' guardians - was completely bypassed! The game proceeded from the screen with the 'spiral' layout [which, incidentally, I forgot to mention last night but which has a very nice design :) ] straight to the final screen (the one with the 'flying Eugene saucers'). I wonder if the 'purple cavern'* will come back when I playtest the Expert mode?... EDIT: Aha! I see what happened now. I had been playing in Build 4 (the one with the title tunes) when I completed Trainer mode. Then it wasn't immediately obvious how to change modes [i've since discovered you can do so on the title screen by pressing 'T', although there is no prompt on the title screen to do so], so I reloaded up the game before playing in Normal mode. But in reloading, I inadvertently went back to Build 3 (the one before the title tunes were added). It seems that Norman added an extra screen (the purple one) in between Builds 3 and 4. :thumbsup: Is Build 4 the most recent one?? It's been removed now, so no downloads of Manic Panic are available currently. (Was there supposed to be one attached to post 50, with the ability to jump off/stand on nasties removed?) *One more bit of feedback - whilst the expanded playing area across the full screen height is great for the enhanced gameplay it provides, it's slightly confusing when discussing the caverns that they don't have names with which to identify them, so that we know which is which. For example, I'm not sure which one MtM was referring to now when talking about the 'penultimate cavern' [the 'tennis' reference didn't help], since the 'penultimate cavern' seems to have changed between Trainer and Normal modes! EDIT: between Builds 3 and 4 of the game. (It's a shame that the hardware doesn't allow a cavern name to be printed in the border!)

I've had a chance to playtest the Trainer* mode of Manic Panic (*so the end sequence remains a mystery to me for now). There are some nice challenges in the game - I anticipate they will be much harder when I attempt Normal mode with its more limited air supply, and even harder still in Expert mode where a single collision with any guardian/nasty is fatal! For now, I have a question and a suggestion. My question is in regard to the final screen (the one with flying saucers moving up and down, which seem to behave like Eugene as you collect the items, only some of the guardians respond to different items being collected than others). I noticed that there are two switches in this screen, but one appears to be completely inaccessible (blocked by wall cells), whilst the other switch doesn't seem to perform any function at all? Is there some way in which either of these switches activates anything? My suggestion is as follows: The penultimate screen (the one with loads of purple crumbly cells) looks great the way that the guardians (the blinking eyes) pass through the background cells (without pixel-colliding with them, of course). I wonder whether that screen would benefit from a similar approach for the items? From their appearance on the screen, the items seem to be placed in air cells (like most items are), but if you walk through them they don't get collected - it's not immediately apparent why, but if you stand on top of one and wait, it soon transpires that the items are embedded within crumbly cells (after eight 'ticks' of the game, Willy falls through and collects the item, because 'behind the scences' the crumbly cell's pixel-rows have disappeared and then the crumbly turns to air). Something similar here to what I did in 'Manic Mixup' might look cool? i.e. In 'Manic Mixup', I rewrote the item-drawing routine so that an item's bitmap doesn't overwrite whatever lies underneath it, but instead is merged with the bitmap of its host cell. This difference in logic is only visible in cases where the items are stored in something other than air cells. e.g. there are some items located within crumbly cells in 'The Vat/The Lab', and there is one item embedded in a solid wall in the first cavern of the game [back in the Central Cavern], which is situated immediately above Willy's head as soon as you start up the game, and which can be accessed by headbutting it away from below (but if you do that straight away, then good luck with trying to complete the cavern...!) The net result is that you can identify the location of the items by their flashing attributes, but their pixel pattern is only fully revealed one pixel-row at a time, as the host cell crumbles or is chipped away. Just a thought. :unsure: EDIT: For what it's worth - though I'm probably teaching my granny to suck eggs - here is the short new subroutine which I created to draw the items in 'Manic Mixup' by merging them with their host cell's graphic: LD B, #08 loop: LD A, (DE) OR (HL) LD (DE), A INC HL INC D DJNZ loop RET Which replaces the previous CALL from #8FAB to #92D5 [those are equivalent addresses taken from SkoolKid's disassembly]. Before the subroutine is called, HL is pointed at the item bitmap for the cavern (#80B4), whilst the item's location in the pixel-buffer is assigned to DE. (The original routine, which overwrites a character space with an 8x8-bitmap, is retained as it is used for other purposes by the game, as well as being used in a subroutine as part of Matthew's 'Print a message' routine.)