BBC Manic Miner disassembly

[Richard Hallas]

Hi,

This is nothing to do with me as such; I merely pass on the information.

Someone on the StarDot.org.uk forums has just done a comprehensive disassembly of the BBC Micro version of Manic Miner. It's on GitHub.

[jetsetdanny]

Thanks for the info, Richard! 👍

[Spider]

Thanks Richard 🙂

I was just about aware of this but having been offline a few days I'd not had chance to post about it. I've not examined it yet in detail either.

I had heard "back then" there was a built in 'writetyper' rumour but there was never anything posted. The way its been coded is highly crafty though as it makes no attempt to (as I understand it, which is not great with the Acorn MOS or 6502 assembly) it does not look at the keyboard input via the MOS with its built in iirc 'key scan' routine nor via reading directly, instead it attempts to grab the keycode directly from #236h , Speccy rough equivalent might be considered to be 23560 ake the "LAST_K" system variable. 🙂

[Spider]

One thing I was working on (in a vague fashion at least) was a fresh update to this platforms JSW1 changes. I did not want to do JSW2 as there's two versions of that to cause more confusion however JSW1 is almost perfect. It plays decently too.

[Richard Hallas]

There's an interesting follow-up to the release of the BBC Manic Miner disassembly.

The same chap who recently disassembled the game – he calls himself TonyLobster – has now put a lot of effort into improving it too. The results are spectacular. Whereas it used to be slower than the Spectrum original and feel really clunky, it's now faster and plays much better. The graphics are now flicker-free. The in-game music, which was worse than on the Spectrum, now sounds good (as befits the BBC's sound chip). The AIR indicator is back to being horizontal, like on the Spectrum, and a split-screen effect is now used to allow it to use the traditional red/green/white colours (usually! – Eugene's Lair is the exception) regardless of the choice of four colours for the playing area above it. It's surprising how this single change makes the whole game feel a lot more colourful, like the Spectrum original.

All in all, it's a vast improvement on the original, and now plays really well. It's actually the enjoyable game that it always should have been – shame it wasn't released like this in the first place! TonyLobster's own summary of the improvements (quoting from his StarDot forum post) is as follows:

* Fast
* Flicker free player movement
* Fixes to cavern layouts, graphics, and colours
* Better air bar and colours
* Fixed the shape of the jump to match the Spectrum
* Better collision detection
* Better music
* 'GAME OVER' added
* Master compatible

Full details about what's been done are on Github: https://github.com/TobyLobster/ManicMiner2021

Anyway, anyone with an interest in the BBC version is encouraged to download the "NEWMINER.ssd" disk image and give it a go. Prepare to be impressed.

Also, the recently discovered cheat mode from the original still works. To recap:

• During a game, press PAUSE (DELETE key)
• Type A SECRET (including the space); if registered, a sound will play
• Press UNPAUSE (COPY key)

Now, you can jump directly to any level of the game by pressing F0 to F9 (levels 1 to 10) or Shift-F0 to Shift-F9 (levels 11 to 20).

Once enabled, the level-jump cheat remains active for the rest of the session. Very useful for getting to the substantially different final two screens.

[jetsetdanny]

Thanks, Richard 🙂 .

TobyLobster has also posted about his excellent work on this forum, in this thread.

 

[Spider]

Now (with TobyLobster's permission) also present here. 🙂

 

[Richard Hallas]

16 hours ago, jetsetdanny said:

Thanks, Richard 🙂 .

TobyLobster has also posted about his excellent work on this forum, in this thread.

Oh… sorry about that; obviously I hadn't realised. He didn't post about the disassembly he made only a couple of weeks ago, so I assumed it would be helpful for me to post again on this same thread. Guess I should have checked first.

Apologies for the wasted bandwidth.

[Spider]

Absolutely zero harm @Richard Hallas , I'd rather hear something twice than not at all as someone thought it had been already said etc. 🙂

As above, with his permission we now host a copy of this excellent work, with a screenshot selection I made to go along with it and split read_me / tech_info details.

[jetsetdanny]

4 hours ago, Spider said:

Absolutely zero harm @Richard Hallas , I'd rather hear something twice than not at all as someone thought it had been already said etc. 🙂

I'll second that! 🙂