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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?)

Another consequence of the bug in 'Ultimate Manic Miner'... There is another room in the game (other than 'Eugene Lair') which contains Skylabs, namely 'Reservoir Pumping Station'. However, the game is quite linear in its layout, and following the usual route through the game, the player would encounter 'Reservoir Pumping Station' before any of the rooms which contain Droplets (namely, as far as I am aware, 'The Menagerie', 'The Stonehenge Mine Subway', and 'The Bank'). Therefore the corruption of the Skylab code will not have taken place by the time you reach 'Reservoir Pumping Station' after you first load up the game file. However, if you were to play the game up until one of the rooms containing Droplets, but then lose all your lives and start another game, then when you reach 'Reservoir Pumping Station' the second time around, the gameplay will be different than it was the first time through! (Because the Skylabs in that room will have morphed into Droplets i.e. always dropping down at the same x-coordinate, with no variation to their horizontal 'dropzone' as is the case for classic Skylabs.) This is reminiscent of the bug in certain Manic Miner mods where Willy jumps off the top of the screen, causing overwriting/corruption of some of the data for other caverns.

It seems that the above suggestion came too late for your initial walk through of UMM, as I've just noticed that you did complete it and uploaded a video of it to your YouTube channel. However, the 'Eugene Lair' in that version looks a lot easier than (and not in the spirit of what) Igor originally intended*, so perhaps another walk-through if the bugfixed version could be put on your to-do list? *Those volcanic flares are supposed to shoot up at different points in the cavern, in the same way that Skylabs drop down at different horizontal positions, so that nowhere is safe to stand for long! For reference, the room in question can be seen 26 minute in to this video: Now watch those flare-ups - because of the big they only pop up in two places - imagine trying to navigate around whilst the fireballs continually switch x-coordinates - a whole different proposition!!

Daniel, when you do get round to completing 'Ultimate Manic Miner', I recommend you use the version which I patched to fix the bug that affected the room 'Eugene Lair', which caused the Skylabs in that room to behave as Droplets (ie they no longer varied their horizontal position). My fix (which required a change to the game engine) brought the game in line with the author Igor Makovsky's original intentions (as expressed in a comment by him on the Yahoo! MMJSW forum). Come to think of it, I don't think that patched version ever had an official release? I was in email contact with Igor about it at one point, he expressed gratitude for the suggested fix, and from memory had an intention to update the game himself at some point, including the fix. But that was several years ago now and I haven't heard anything from him since. My fixed version is probably attached to a topic here somewhere, but it would be nice if you could include it in the relevant entry at JSW Central? UPDATE: I just checked, and I didn't actually attach a bug fixed gamefile in the topic that I created on this subject* back in the day. Rather, I included a list of the POKES which may be used to fix the game engine to allow for both functional Skylabs and Droplets in a single game. (John Elliott's Droplets patch for JSW64 permanently erases the code which determines the Skylabs' behaviour). *The topic is called 'For fans of Ultimate Manic Miner', which in hindsight seems somewhat ironic (given Danny's subsequent description of how much criticism the game got when it was originally released - for its overuse of quirky features - which I wasn't aware of when I created the topic!)

I guess many people like to stick to the 48K limit. (If you're going 'retro' with your games, then you may as well go the whole hog, and the 128K Spectrum came later than old rubber keys - although the ZX81 was even earlier, its 16KB limit perhaps takes that concept too far/limits the size of the games too much?) If you add up the MM(48) and JSW48 mods from your list above, they amount to about two-thirds of the total (with JSW128 and JSW64 games collectively only making up about a third). So with that in mind - now that Norman Sword has managed to devise an optimised MM game engine which allows significantly more caverns within the 48KB constraint (how many more exactly? I don't believe Norman specified?), perhaps more such modified, more expansively cavernous games might be forthcoming in future?

My reading of Danny's post wasn't that it was a criticism of your endeavours, more of a lament that it isn't (currently) presented in a more accessible format that would allow people to create games using your nicely optimised MM engine with ease. I do seem to recall you releasing a version of Manic Miner with a fairly user-friendly in-built editor? But that was incorporated within the 48KB of the game itself, if I recall correctly, which I guess limits the amount of additional caverns that could be included within the 48KB memory limit? Danny is suggesting (perhaps as a pipe dream, but I believe in a positive, non-critical spirit) that someone [else, if not yourself] might at some point create an editor which runs on a PC or other similar platform, incorporating a user-friendly GUI, and into which 48KB MM game files (optimised as per your recent upload) could be loaded and edited by Joe Bloggs.

I would just add that, in relation to Andrew Broad's 'JSW64 Manic Miner: James Bond' game, the determining factor for the number of caverns was the number of (canonical) James Bond movies that had been released at the time of the game's publication. (Each cavern being dedicated to a single Bond movie, in chronological order.) The original version (1.0, released in 2007) contained 21 caverns, the last one being 'Casino Royale' (which was the most recent movie at that point, having been released in 2006); the game was updated with version 1.1 in 2009 to include an additional cavern 'Quantum of Solace' (film released in 2008). In the readme file released with v1.1, Andrew Broad said: "I plan to extend my game as future Bond-films are released. At the time of writing, Bond 23 is due in cinemas in 2011, so that will be added in v1.2" [However, in reality the next movie wasn't released until 2012, followed by two more in 2015/2021, and no further versions of Andrew's game have been released to date to incorporate caverns covering those movies.] So in the hypothetical world where more than 30 James Bond films had already been released prior to 2007, Andrew would probably have taken the opportunity provided by the JSW64 game engine to create a MM game containing more than 30 caverns from the outset.

Actually Andy, you might need to think again there. Did you actually try that out? Because looking at it again, E isn't actually updated when the tune note index is increased, so when DE is added to HL (the second definition of HL) at #8B50, it won't pick up the new note during the current pass through the Main Loop. So you would need to use that spare, NOPped out byte at #8B4C for a LD E, A instruction. Edit: Thinking about it, the effect of E not being updated straight away probably just means that the tune will be playing 'one note behind'. It should play at the right speed. But the first note (first pitch value) will only play half as long as it should when you start playing the game. (And the normal fix for that - setting the music note index to #FF during game initialisation - won't work this time; I think that would cause the last note of the tune to be played during the first pass through the Main Loop.)

I must admit I used AND #01 to affect the Zero flag - to decide when to increment (or not) the music note index - but it never occurred to me to just directly add the value of A (after the AND command) to the note index, which has the same effect since A can only hold 00 or 01 at that point. A very elegant and efficient solution! (Mine might be slightly more adaptable, as you can decide whether to advance the music on an 'odd' or an 'even' game tick, by selecting the polarity of the conditional jump: JR Z or JR NZ. However, mine needed an extra precious byte compared to yours, so yours wins!)

Indeed! Only 64 bytes per tune though. If you had 20 tunes of 256 bytes each, that wouldn't leave much room for anything else!