IRF

View File Maria vs. Some Bastards 2019 Bug-Fixed Edition
Maria vs. Some Bastards is a beautiful game by Vidar Eriksen (Erix1). It uses a modified JSW48 game engine that has come to be known as 'Erix1 Mode'. Its first short demo version was released in October 2001. The game was gamma-released on 6th March 2003, with four bug-fixed revisions (called Rev B, C, D and E) released within the next few weeks.
A menu screen implemented by the BASIC loader allows the player to choose one of the three modes: Easy, Normal or Hard. According to the message which shows in the opening room, you need to collect 120 items to complete the game if you choose the Easy mode, 240 items if you choose the Normal mode and 246 items if you choose the Hard mode.
Daniel Gromann raised the question of the game question of the game’s completability on the Manic Miner Jet Set Willy Yahoo! Group in June 2007, when he pointed out that Maria did not disappear after he had collected 251 items in the Hard mode.
In March 2012, Vidar Eriksen promised to look into the problem and check whether some ‘end-game corrections’ he had done in Rev D were not left out in Rev E. He mentioned that a Rev F might be necessary, but it did not materialise in the following years.
Ian Rushforth investigated the item-collecting code in Maria vs. Some Bastards and discovered the cause of the bug which made the game non-completable. He announced his findings on Manic Miner Jet Set Willy Yahoo! Group in February 2019, offered a bug-fix for the problem and also showed the way to collect one of the items Daniel had not been able to reach.
After some further discussions, the Jet Set Willy Manic Miner Community Team produced a 2019 Bug-Fixed Edition of the game, with the following changes in relation to Rev E:
- Ian’s solution to the bug in the item-collecting code was applied.

- A way was provided to collect the rightmost item in the room "Stinking sewer" (27), which seems impossible to collect in Rev E.
- Three items located in the very same (non-)rooms which are used by the Softricks game engine (on which Erix1 Mode is based) to store the item table - which are thus invisible and unreachable in Rev E - were moved to other locations so that they became present in the game and collectable.
- As the total number of items possible to collect has now reached 256, the number required to complete the Hard mode was set to 256, with the corresponding changes in the BASIC loader and the message in “Master Bedroom”, where the game starts.
- An item placed in the same location as another item (as happens in “The Beach” in the original JSW) in the room “Afterliving” (46) was moved within the same room to make its collection more demanding and make the player use a route they might not use otherwise.
- A minor change to the layout of “Alien inferno 2" (49) was applied to force the player to press the special button in that room if they want to complete it without losing a life.
- The middle item in the room “Bubbles and Bob” (41) was moved to make its collection more meaningful.
- The up exit from "That slimy room" (11) was changed to itself instead of "The dungeon" (00), in order to prevent the protagonist from potentially getting perpetually stuck at the bottom-right corner of the latter room.
- The spellings of the room names “Flooding sewer” (15), “Seagull corner” (36) and “Deadly descent” (54) were corrected.
- A typo in the scrolly for Manic Mining Robot's Day Out, the ‘secret bonus crap game' attached to Maria vs. Some Bastards was corrected.
- Information about this being the 2019 Bug-Fixed Edition was added on the loading screen and in the REM statements in the BASIC loader.
- The Readme was also updated with the info that this is the 2019 Bug-Fixed Edition.
 
All of the above changes were applied to the actual game file by Ian Rushforth, after some deliberations with Andy Ford and Daniel Gromann.
We hope you will enjoy this Bug-Fixed Edition and the ability to complete Maria vs Some Bastards at long last. Have a go at it - it’s worth it! 🙂
Submitter IRF Submitted 04/13/2019 Category JSWMM Releases  

Hi guys, hi dear Sendy!
Missed you so much.
Ultimate Manic Miner is the hardcore jsw gaming with a low respect to the newcomers. The target audience would probably be crazy jsw players like Andrew Broad. Better play it on youtube.
Over hype? Probably. The effect of the youth maximalism.
I'm fine and this is my first actual day on the forum. So much has been going on here. Forward to stay in touch more and, might be, return to jsw scene if I find the way to launch jswed on my mac.

For this reason, I will probably record v. 3 in the same way I have recorded versions 1.05 and 2 - in three different speed modes. In case of v. 3, each speed mode will also present a different order of MM caverns (the third one being the random one).
I am currently working on v. 2 video, if all goes well I will upload it to the JSW Central later tonight (I've got a few hours left since I'm in the western hemisphere right now 😉 ).

So the only difference between modes 3 and 4 is 'behind the scenes' - the order of caverns to be encountered is determined (shuffled) at the start of the game, or else they are randomly selected as the game proceeds. But from the player's perspective, they are identical. (Although I suppose in the former case, the random order must be listed at some memory addresses, so a hacker could PEEK in advance (if they knew the right address) and find out which cavern will come up next? 

Penelope58, thank you for your post, but... are you a person?... or a bot??? 
I'm asking this because while I whole-heartedly agree with the comment you posted, its content is just an edit of my initial comment in this thread, slightly modified, as ChatGPT could have done.
So I wouldn't be surprised if you posted several such messages, to "authenticate" yourself, and then started to spam us with non-JSW related things...

Hi Guys,
As someone familiar with the game, I highly encourage everyone to give it a try—not just a quick look, but play it through to the end! It’s possible to complete without losing a single life (though it’s quite a challenge unless you save/reload snapshots or use Rollback! 😉). This masterpiece combines Sendy’s brilliant design with Erix1’s enhancements to the JSW48 game engine, offering visually stunning elements and engaging gameplay challenges.
The game also has an interesting history. A beta version was shared in the now-defunct MM/JSW Yahoo! Group back in 2004, but the much-anticipated gamma release didn’t happen at the time. For those who remember those days, the long wait has been worth it—what a fantastic comeback by Sendy!
Don’t miss out, play it to completion, and keep an eye out for Sendy’s other promising projects. 🙂

By the way, in your test_fall demo, it looks like Maria has catched up Willy with the last unopened bottle.... what Willy was just going to "tidy up".😆

Thank you for your demos, Spider! They made this very clear! ☺️Thank you, too, IRF, for the fun fact! 🙂I think there should be lots of toilets positioned in every room in every JSW game to save Willy falling too far!😋

And a quick demo, no player interaction needed other than to start the game:
test_fall.tap
 
Same 'base' as the other two test files, ie: OK for editing for testing not really recommended for building a whole game from.
EDIT... Updated very slightly, now Willy has the choice of moving left to collect the single (wine bottle) item from Top Landing or go to rightwards to explore.
A little care should be taken with when he grabs the item with regard to the descending razor blade guardian! However if he does lose a life, upon re-materialisation he'll clear it on his automated run.

Fun(?) fact: if you extend the Bathroom ramp all the way down to the floor, and put a hole in the upper platform directly above the toilet, then during the toilet run Willy will run up the ramp and drop through the hole... But will disappear halfway through the fall... then appear suddenly in the toilet. (ie Without visibly falling through half of the height of the room.)
This is because the code which tests for Willy's coordinates at the end of the toilet run doesn't check which vertical half of the room he is in.

(But of course, when he is eventually drawn with his head down the toilet, he is in the correct location - bottom-right corner, bottom half of the Bathroom.)

Fun(?) fact: if you extend the Bathroom ramp all the way down to the floor, and put a hole in the upper platform directly above the toilet, then during the toilet run Willy will run up the ramp and drop through the hole... But will disappear halfway through the fall... then appear suddenly in the toilet. (ie Without visibly falling through half of the height of the room.)
This is because the code which tests for Willy's coordinates at the end of the toilet run doesn't check which vertical half of the room he is in.

Fun(?) fact: if you extend the Bathroom ramp all the way down to the floor, and put a hole in the upper platform directly above the toilet, then during the toilet run Willy will run up the ramp and drop through the hole... But will disappear halfway through the fall... then appear suddenly in the toilet. (ie Without visibly falling through half of the height of the room.)
This is because the code which tests for Willy's coordinates at the end of the toilet run doesn't check which vertical half of the room he is in.

(But of course, when he is eventually drawn with his head down the toilet, he is in the correct location - bottom-right corner, bottom half of the Bathroom.)

Fun(?) fact: if you extend the Bathroom ramp all the way down to the floor, and put a hole in the upper platform directly above the toilet, then during the toilet run Willy will run up the ramp and drop through the hole... But will disappear halfway through the fall... then appear suddenly in the toilet. (ie Without visibly falling through half of the height of the room.)
This is because the code which tests for Willy's coordinates at the end of the toilet run doesn't check which vertical half of the room he is in.

It does. A number of games are only toilet-completable thanks to this feature.

Doesn't pressing P during the toilet run stop him in his tracks? 

Doesn't pressing P during the toilet run stop him in his tracks? 

The ability to slow the game down would be useful for the room 'The Garden' in JSW2 [original version], the crossing of which requires a succession of well-timed, pixel-perfect jumps.  :o

I just had a thought - is it theoretically possible to complete the original Jet Set Willy without applying any POKES, not even the four officially released ones?
The Attic Bug corrupts the game data and code in unpredictable ways, so unpredictable that the effects are different every time you play the game. Might it be possible in theory that one effect could be to corrupt the list of guardians in both Conservatory Roof and First Landing, creating an arrow which passes along the character row where the items are located in each of those rooms (an invisible item, in the latter case).
Were that to happen, then the white INK of the arrow would auto-collect the items that otherwise can't be collected without using the official POKES, and so the unPOKED game could in theory be completed (provided Willy can manage to complete his journey through the corrupted mansion without one of the many other side-effects of the Attic Bug getting him!)

The walkthoughts were possibly (likely?) mine, I've done several.
Certain rooms however when the bug is in effect do seem to make it deteriorate a bit faster, notably "Inside the MegaTrunk" , staying here and switching emulation speed up a bit (200% is fine) you'll see the status bar start to corrupt. Kitchens can have a similar effect, although the guardians moving horizontally at that stage is erm distracting.
 
A sidenote about the other "big three" bugs: I think half or most of the battle is Banyan Tree, if it were possible to jump from the left side and catch onto a water cell without hitting a guardian, you could then climb it. The "First Landing" object something would have to be done or the item count adjusted to ignore it, same perhaps as "Conservatory Roof"

I just had a thought - is it theoretically possible to complete the original Jet Set Willy without applying any POKES, not even the four officially released ones?
The Attic Bug corrupts the game data and code in unpredictable ways, so unpredictable that the effects are different every time you play the game. Might it be possible in theory that one effect could be to corrupt the list of guardians in both Conservatory Roof and First Landing, creating an arrow which passes along the character row where the items are located in each of those rooms (an invisible item, in the latter case).
Were that to happen, then the white INK of the arrow would auto-collect the items that otherwise can't be collected without using the official POKES, and so the unPOKED game could in theory be completed (provided Willy can manage to complete his journey through the corrupted mansion without one of the many other side-effects of the Attic Bug getting him!)

The corrupted guardians can cause corruptions themselves, but in an unpoked game Willy would just instantly die on entering those rooms preventing the enemies from corrupting the game further. The cheat POKEs in the video I saw were to prevent deaths from guardians, allowing them to cause further corruption.

Could it be possible that those cheat Pokes have corrupted the corrupted parts even more?

The effects aren't unpredictable and aren't different every time you play - the arrow's trajectory is consistent and writes to the same bytes every time.
To be precise, it corrupts the flying bird, UFO, Esmerelda, giant head, skull, sunflower, and Andre enemies, and any room those enemies can be found in result in the guardians being misplaced and (depending on the room) embedded into walls (which automatically kills Willy on room entry). None of those enemies can be found in First Landing, The Banyan Tree, or Conservatory Roof, the rooms that would need changes in order to make completion possible.
It's possible to complete Jet Set Willy without fixing the Attic bug, though - you can apply the other three POKEs (42183,11; 56876,4; and 60231,0), play the game as normal making sure to only climb the East Wall and get the items in Priests' Hole and Dr Jones and head into the Attic once you have all of the other items. From the Attic, you can go Under the Roof -> Conservatory Roof -> Orangery -> Swimming Pool -> Banyan Tree (left to right - not easy!) -> The Nightmare Room -> First Landing -> Top Landing -> Master Bedroom and complete the game.
You can't complete it twice though, because the rooms with those enemies in don't become accessible again even after beating the game.