[File] Manic Miner - Highscore Challenge

[MtM]

44 minutes ago, IRF said:

No extra lives are awarded in JSW, so you would have to POKE a big number to the Remaining Lives variable to see what happens.

Hmm. Fair suggestion. But the sheer brilliant madness of what Duck has done seems like it ought to be done in a more fitting way. There must be some way. How about the degradation of the tune, could that be the seed? Just an idea.

[IRF]

It sounds like Invalid Arrows are exactly what you're looking for.

[jetsetdanny]

On 2/26/2024 at 1:49 PM, IRF said:

(Incidentally, anyone working on a MM mod and finding a purpose for that available part of memory - #934C-9CFF - would be advised to steer clear of the last few bytes, lest the program overwrite the addresses stored on the stack during flow of execution, or vice versa!) 

Sendy's "Manic Person" has the stack address changed (in both versions). It uses the spare bytes related to unused guardian data at #FAF3 - #FAFF. To be precise, the instruction at #8401 - #8403 places the stack at #FAFE. So when there's one address on the stack, it occupies the last two bytes of this spare space (i.e. #FAFE and #FAFF). I don't quite understand why it works this way, but then the following addresses are occupied going 'backwards' (i.e. the next occupied pair of addresses will be #FAFC - #FAFD, then #FAFA - #FAFB and so on). 

When working on the 'postproduction' of "Manic Person" (adding some special effects and loads of music), I was a little worried that a stack overwflow could occur, since the available space allocated to the stack is limited. However, after playtesting the game by completing it twice (two sets of caverns), there were still four or six spare bytes in the allocated space (00s, not overwritten by the program). It was actually the same amount as after completing the game for the first time (one set of caverns). So I decided it was safe to leave the stack there, as I couldn't think of any scenario in which it would occupy (overwrite) more space.

The change was done in order to use the space at #934C - #9CFF for other purposes, of course.

[jetsetdanny]

19 hours ago, IRF said:

No extra lives are awarded in JSW, so you would have to POKE a big number to the Remaining Lives variable to see what happens.

"Terry The Turtle" is the game to try it "the natural way", i.e. without any POKEs.

You start out with 7 lives which are visible on the screen. As you gain extra lives, 4 more become visible as little turtles on the screen, just like the original 7. The next 3 extra lives are not marked in any visible way, and then with the 15th life the leftmost little turtle at the bottom of the screen, symbolising a life, starts to flicker. Then, with the following extra lives, the next turtles at the bottom of the screen start to flicker. When the number of lives exceeds 28, it affects the display of the room names (the letters disappear starting with the leftmost one; the effect is irreversible - even if the number of your lives goes down below 28 again, the affected letters in room names in new rooms you enter are not visible). With even more lives the game is slowed down or it can crash or become unplayable in some other way (e.g. because of 'rogue' cells blocking your way).

As the author of the game, Steve Dixon (Jammajup), explains, "if you are good at these types of games and constantly use the emulator save state you can collect so many lives you can slow down or even crash the game!" Indeed, this is a serious problem and in order to eliminate it, while recording the RZX walkthroughs of the four versions of the game (three of which still need to be improved - please see this thread for details), I deliberately killed Terry many times during each walkthrough, so as not to have more than 28 lives at any point in the game. The elimination of the excessive number of lives had to take place, much as I dislike serial suicides 😉 . However, if someone is interested, you could experiment with the extra lives and the effects their excess produces.
 

[IRF]

I suppose there is an ecological analogy to be drawn - overpopulation of some species (not generally turtles though!) can be damaging to the ecosystem once natural predators of those species are eliminated from a habitat.

Edited February 27 by IRF

[DigitalDuck]

On 2/26/2024 at 9:54 AM, DigitalDuck said:

There's a limit to how many lives you can have before each level becomes incompletable (although you can always lose lives until they become completable again).

So I have a couple of corrections to this, namely that I'd missed some things that reduce the life count before some levels become incompletable:

Eugene's Lair - at 39 lives, the platform with the black toilet is completely overshadowed by the garbage platform. Unfortunately it's now one cell too high to safely drop down from, and there's no other way down without falling too far.

Return of the Alien Kong Beast - at 37 lives, all ways back down are blocked, and again the only way to get down is to fall too far.

Attack of the Mutant Telephones - while it's possible to go from top to bottom by jumping through the top of the screen, the platform in the middle becomes an island once you reach 42 lives and there's no way to get up or down from it.

 

16 hours ago, jetsetdanny said:

"Terry The Turtle" is the game to try it "the natural way", i.e. without any POKEs.

You start out with 7 lives which are visible on the screen. As you gain extra lives, 4 more become visible as little turtles on the screen, just like the original 7. The next 3 extra lives are not marked in any visible way, and then with the 15th life the leftmost little turtle at the bottom of the screen, symbolising a life, starts to flicker. Then, with the following extra lives, the next turtles at the bottom of the screen start to flicker. When the number of lives exceeds 28, it affects the display of the room names (the letters disappear starting with the leftmost one; the effect is irreversible - even if the number of your lives goes down below 28 again, the affected letters in room names in new rooms you enter are not visible). With even more lives the game is slowed down or it can crash or become unplayable in some other way (e.g. because of 'rogue' cells blocking your way).

As the author of the game, Steve Dixon (Jammajup), explains, "if you are good at these types of games and constantly use the emulator save state you can collect so many lives you can slow down or even crash the game!" Indeed, this is a serious problem and in order to eliminate it, while recording the RZX walkthroughs of the four versions of the game (three of which still need to be improved - please see this thread for details), I deliberately killed Terry many times during each walkthrough, so as not to have more than 28 lives at any point in the game. The elimination of the excessive number of lives had to take place, much as I dislike serial suicides 😉 . However, if someone is interested, you could experiment with the extra lives and the effects their excess produces.
 

Interesting. I'll post about it in that thread if I decide to experiment with that, but it's definitely unique for JSW-style games.

[IRF]

1 hour ago, DigitalDuck said:

Eugene's Lair - at 39 lives, the platform with the black toilet is completely overshadowed by the garbage platform. Unfortunately it's now one cell too high to safely drop down from, and there's no other way down without falling too far.

Return of the Alien Kong Beast - at 37 lives, all ways back down are blocked, and again the only way to get down is to fall too far.

At 34 to 38 lives for Eugene, it looks like you would have to take a different route to access the bottom left of the cavern, because you can jump over the black toilet without ending up back on top of the new platform? So you would have to drop down to walk along underneath the black toilet?

I have another interesting experiment for you - try resetting the crumbly attribute in Eugene's Lair to non-bright magenta ink on black paper, set the dancing lives to the right-most frame of animation (by starting and stopping the in-game music), POKE the number of remaining lives to 48 and then try playing that cavern to see what happens when Willy stands on those newly created blocks? (Both the pixel-less ones on the left, and the ones on the right which should have pixels because they coincide with where the conveyor is!)

Return of Kong - it looks to me like 36 lives will also create a platform on the left which Willy can't descend past? Because that tricky leftwards jump through the corner of a short floor platform, which you normally have to do from the longish platform just left of centre halfway down the cavern, won't work (you'll pass through the corner of the short platform but then land on the new platform just beneath it?)

Mutant Telephones - you could escape it you could stand on the spider threads without being killed. It always struck me as odd that you can do that in The Menagerie, but not in here (or The Bank).

Edited February 28 by IRF

[IRF]

2 minutes ago, IRF said:

I have another interesting experiment for you - try resetting the crumbly attribute in Eugene's Lair to non-bright magenta ink on black paper, set the dancing lives to the right-most frame of animation (by starting and stopping the in-game music), POKE the number of remaining lives to 48 and then try playing that cavern to see what happens when Willy stands on those newly created blocks? (Both the pixel-less ones on the left, and the ones on the right which should have pixels because they coincide with where the conveyor is!)

The POKES for that experiment:

POKE #C232, #03

POKE #8457, #30

In decimal, that's:

POKE 49714, 20

POKE 33879, 48

Then start up the game, wait until the extra lives are showing in the their rightmost animation frame before pressing ENTER to stop their dancing, type 6032769 and then the cavern teleport code: 36.

EDIT: Ooh, it's just occurred to me that the Cheat Mode Boot will also be printed somewhere rogue if you have too many lives and Cheat Mode is activated...

[IRF]

I just tried the above experiment. (The idea behind it being to match the crumbly attribute in Eugene's Lair to one of the bit maps for a part of Willy's sprite.) 

When Willy stands on the corrupted conveyor, the conveyor's pixels start to crumble downwards whilst they're also animating rightwards! It's more interesting if you proceed along the conveyor from right to left, rather than vice versa. (So the pixels keep on coming from the left, otherwise they all disappear quite quickly.)

Also, try leaving the music on with the spare lives dancing - the errant blocks change colour in time with the music, and if Willy is standing on the right hand end of the conveyor, then the downwards crumbly-conveyor animation keeps stopping and starting depending on the animation frame of the spare lives!

(A couple of other observations: the conveyor no longer drags Willy along, even though it is still animated to look like it should. And the ever head stalactite is no longer lethal to Willy.)

Edited February 28 by IRF

[DigitalDuck]

5 hours ago, IRF said:

Return of Kong - it looks to me like 36 lives will also create a platform on the left which Willy can't descend past? Because that tricky leftwards jump through the corner of a short floor platform, which you normally have to do from the longish platform just left of centre halfway down the cavern, won't work (you'll pass through the corner of the short platform but then land on the new platform just beneath it?)

With the life sprite in its first position, you can also get through the corner of the new platform and land on the small platform underneath it. This jump stops being possible at 37 lives.