Spider Posted March 20, 2021 Report Share Posted March 20, 2021 View File Jet Set Willy Mono Plus JSW Mono Plus A small expansion on the existing 'JSW Mono' variant offering a choice of colours! The download consists of a .tap tape file and a small 'tech notes' text file covering a few details of interest. Although the patch to set 'JSW Mono' is readily available from John Elliott's site (home of the brilliant JSWED tool) and it is indeed quite possible to find a prebuilt game file with it applied from other sites, both with and without bug fixes it is by it's nature slightly limited in what colours are permitted. Monochrome does not always have to mean white text on black paper! Upon loading the player is presented with a neat and tidy menu offering a range of suggested presets, selectable by a letter key: White ink with black paper White ink with black paper and bright enabled (This is the original 'JSW Mono patch' effect output when applied to the game engine) The above options are also offered in inverse! That being white paper with black ink, again available with or without bright. A basic 'green screen' choice is available, limited to green ink on black paper but with the option of bright enabled or not. Thought was given to offering an 'amber' choice too as 'back in the day' there were amber 'mono' monitors around as well as the more common green-screen and black-white ones. Unfortunately it was felt that the Spectrum's yellow was not really quite adequate enough to pass itself off as an amber mono display, so the option of a preset for this is not initially offered however, read on about choices... To allow further visual entertainment, the player may select their own preference for desired ink , paper , bright and (if they insist!) flash options. A basic sanity check is applied to prevent the player choosing the same value for paper and ink and a further check to confirm they really do want flash enabled. Upon completion of picking the colour options the text for the custom option is displayed in those colours. Please refer to screenshots of the menu, it was written to be self-explanatory as far as sensibly possible. The player may at this stage change their mind and pick a default value or re-enter a choice of custom values. When happy pressing the 'R' key will execute the game code, this is necessary even if one of the pre-defined choices is selected. A basic check is present to ensure an option has been chosen before the 'R' key will function as no option is selected by default. The currently "active choice" is shown by the menu letter control key being set to flash. Again please take a look at the screenshots. We hope you enjoy this small expansion tweak to the existing 'JSW Mono' ! Submitter Spider Submitted 03/20/2021 Category Jet Set Willy [Patched] IRF 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spider Posted March 20, 2021 Author Report Share Posted March 20, 2021 Very small update to fix a typo in the menu and update the description text a little bit. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jetsetdanny Posted March 21, 2021 Report Share Posted March 21, 2021 Andy, My feedback related to this project comprises a general reflection about new games vs. "minor mods" (which I will refrain from publishing now - I started writing it, but I don't have time to finish it right now; I'll publish it in a separate thread when time permits and if I don't change my mind), and comments related directly to the game. I will now proceed to the latter. It's an interesting idea to give the player a chance to play JSW in a monochromatic version with the colours of their choice. I appreciate what you have done so far, especially the fact that the player has the ability to input their own colours. Having said that, for me this project would have more value if it was done at the level of the machine code, not the BASIC loader, so that the player could go back and change the colours without reloading the game. I am saying this because I think the main merit of this project is to allow the player to see what different colour combinations would look like in JSW. Not really to play the game from start to finish with one colour scheme - *I* wouldn't want to do it, it would be boring - but to check out several combinations quickly just to see what they look like. For this, making it possible to change them without reloading the game would be crucial. I would imagine it more or less like this: on the title screen, there would be "ENTER to Start" or "C for Colour Options" (or something to that effect). Pressing ENTER would start the game with the colour scheme currently in place. Pressing "C" would lead to a new screen, where all the options would be (more or less like you have now in the BASIC loader, only I would change them). The player would be asked to input their desired colour scheme (with the numbers for colours being written out so that they know what to press) and to choose whether they want to play (in terms of the items' appearance) with 'Wobble', 'Jiggle' or neither. Personally, I would not offer any ready colour combinations (why offer green and not cyan or red?) but always ask the player to input the colours (plus turn the brightness on or off). The values would be modified only if the player input something, e.g. if they only input the INK colour, but not the PAPER colour, the latter would logically remain as it was before the player entered the Colour Options screen. So the player actually wouldn't *have to* enter anything (they could leave the Colour Options screen without making any changes, by pressing the key that would mean "go back to the title screen"), but they would *have to* input the colour number IF they wanted to change it - they couldn't just choose "black on white", or "white on black" or any other "pre-prepared" options. In a more ambitious scenario, there could also be a choice between the status bar (lower third of the screen) being colourful or monocromatic. After the selections have been made on this special screen, the game would return to the title screen where the player could either press ENTER to start the game with the selected colours, or could go back to the Colour Options screen if they reconsidered and wanted to choose different colours. After losing all lives or resetting the game, the program would return to the title screen. There the player could either start another game (by pressing ENTER) if they were satisfied with their choice of colours, or they could go to the Colour Options screen to change them. I would also suggest that in such an expanded version of "Mono" the imperfections that arise because of the lack of colours are addressed. For example, in the Swimming Pool the water disappears (because the Water cells are blank, i.e. INKless), which looks bad - Willy walks in the air. I would suggest making the Water cells full and adjusting the attributes accordingly - if the Water cells are "INKful" in a monocromatic version, e.g. if their INK colour is green, they will be all green (without any pattern), which would be more logical than having an empty swimming pool and Willy walking in the air. "The Swimming Pool" is just a prime example of the problem, but there are probably other places where the INK/PAPER arrangements should be adjusted. In fact, the bathtub in the bathroom is the first example of this - the conveyor, which is the bathtub, is mainly blank, it has INK only in the uppermost and lowermost pixel row of the cell. It would make more sense to make it mostly filled so that the player can at least see this bathtub well, not a ghost of it. In this particular case, I am not advocating modifying the game in relation to the original (as you are creating a slightly modified version of the original, not a new game), but the adjustments I mentioned would be valuable, IMO - not to modify the game, but to fix things which get corrupted/messed up because of the change of the colour scheme. These are my suggestions, for whatever they are worth 😉 . P.S. I kept writing about "monochromatic", but shouldn't it really be "duochromatic" - as we always have two colours there (INK and PAPER)? Spider 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IRF Posted March 21, 2021 Report Share Posted March 21, 2021 3 hours ago, jetsetdanny said: I would also suggest that in such an expanded version of "Mono" the imperfections that arise because of the lack of colours are addressed. For example, in the Swimming Pool the water disappears (because the Water cells are blank, i.e. INKless), which looks bad - Willy walks in the air. I would suggest making the Water cells full and adjusting the attributes accordingly - if the Water cells are "INKful" in a monocromatic version, e.g. if their INK colour is green, they will be all green (without any pattern), which would be more logical than having an empty swimming pool and Willy walking in the air. In that scenario the underwater guardian would collide with the pixels of the water cells, causing instant death to Willy! jetsetdanny and Spider 1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jetsetdanny Posted March 21, 2021 Report Share Posted March 21, 2021 I didn't think of that! Perhaps it could addressed in a different way, like putting just one row of Water cells on top for Willy to walk on, or perhaps filling the swimming pool with Water, but leaving a blank path for the guardian to move back and forth. Just thinking aloud... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spider Posted March 21, 2021 Author Report Share Posted March 21, 2021 🙂 Brief answer for now. I've not read your honest feedback as negative (honest!) I appreciate good/bad/other input at all times. I did not want to 'mod' the game core code (by this i mean machine code block) too much. The shortened startup routine was something I have a home-made .pok file for so it was a moment to apply that. The reason for not offering cyan or red , I must of not explained properly sorry. The primary choice of 'green' was simply because there were (and are) green screen monitors around, and to a less popular extent, amber and in some cases white (as in paper white) 🙂 Joke: I don't think there's such a thing as a mono cyan or red monitor 😄 , however it would not be difficult to do a red one with a colour CRT by disconnecting the G and B from the amplifier stage (don't try this at home folks! 30kV not pleasant at the final anode and the red/green/blue electron guns can run at up to 3kV in some cases) , this is not a DIY proposition! I also did not really have the ability without much time taken to write the routine in assembly either, I could just about do it however but this then leads onto "we've done that so how about offering xyz too" , I resisted the difficult temptation to tweak it as I'd wanted to reduce the beach item to one and either give the 'moved item' a shape or remove it altogether. There is a small solution to those who would perhaps prefer a bit of chaos. Apply the following poke after the game is 'running' , ie at title screen stage or at a minimum after the 'menu' has applied or been prevented from applying its change: POKE 35339 , 058 POKE 35340 , 222 POKE 35341 , 128 POKE 35342 , 024 POKE 35343 , 010 On a slightly different note, the 'cheat' does work (its limited I was going to add more to that too) and the mono JSW1 style loading title I think suits quite well. EDIT... I did look into the 'monochromatic' term/definition but was not really sure if it suited or not, ie: Monochromatic Edition. I'd not heard of 'duochromatic' before, although my understanding of 'mono' simply means (rightly or wrongly) a single colour combined with black or two colours one being the background and one being the foreground. jetsetdanny 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spider Posted March 24, 2021 Author Report Share Posted March 24, 2021 A few pics were (sort of) requested elsewhere so I thought I'd attach them here rather than into the file itself, its just a single 'combi-pic' IRF 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spider Posted March 25, 2021 Author Report Share Posted March 25, 2021 The above manual pokes were helpfully converted to a .pok file as attached. I can't do an 'undo' for it for two reasons: 1. Spin does not always honour the undo value for some reason, Spectaculator does as does Zero and Fuse (iirc) 2. As part of it is user set during load, I'd be forced to set a preset colour choice. I've called it chaos mode but I suppose its not really that bad, just try a few rooms with it applied anyway: Mono_Plus_Patch.pok Apply during title screen / gameplay , ie: anytime after menu has 'done its stuff' Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jetsetdanny Posted April 18, 2021 Report Share Posted April 18, 2021 Jet Set Mono Plus now has its individual page on JSW Central, complete with a screenshot gallery with the screenshot of each room taken with a different colour configuration! Well, perhaps not every single room, there may be some repetitions, but in general it show the variety of the colour schemes that can be applied 🙂 . Please let me know if there is anything in the description that needs correcting. Spider 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Spider Posted April 19, 2021 Author Report Share Posted April 19, 2021 Thanks @jetsetdanny It looks 100% to me. I've just made a tiny alteration to the download page, although merely to put the 'detailed tech notes' from the descriptor into a text file rather than on the main page itself. Nothing else was changed. I thought that better as its allows an easier to read experience for those who want the basics of it without the detail, and the documented changes are in said text file for those who want to refer to it. 🙂 jetsetdanny 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.