Manic Miner 128

[jetsetdanny]

I don't think this version has been discussed before. I couldn't find any reference to it on the forum, but perhaps I'm missing something. In any case, there is some relatively fresh news related to it 🙂 .

In the early 2000s, Mihai Novitchi created a 128K version of Manic Miner with AY music and a built-in cheat menu. The tune, which is a full-length version of "In the Hall of the Mountain King", goes back to the beginning whenever the player enters a new cavern or loses a life. However, it keeps playing when the game is paused (using the regular pause keys) and during the Game Over sequence.

Pressing '1' brings up a cheat menu, in which the player can select infinite lives and infinite air, and turn the in-game tune on or off (if turned off, it actually stays on one note, producing an unpleasant effect, which sometimes disappears after moving to the next cavern).

Mihai's variant is based on the Software Projects version of Manic Miner.

Mihai announced the project in April 2002. It is not clear when the last version of the game file was created; it was certainly before May 2004.

In 2022, Bob Fossil decided to fix the bugs found in Mihai's version, including the problem of the music code playing the last note over and over again when the player turned the music off or ended up on the Game Over screen. He found out that Mihai's code was using an interrupt-based music player for the 128k music and was just enabling and disabling interrupts to start and stop the music. It failed to call the 'stop' routine to silence the AY chip in the music player, which is why the music was getting stuck. Bob first patched Mihai's code and then converted the game into a TAP file with the original Manic Miner animated loading screen. He released his version in August 2022.

In April 2023, Mr Scratcher found a bug in Bob's original release (related to Mihai's earlier code modifications) which Bob fixed. Further discussion and playtesting resulted in Bob's repatching the original Manic Miner file from scratch (using the 128k music from Mihai's Z80 snapshot), fixing the bugs that had been discovered, making the teleport cheat work again and adding an invulnerability option. In the process, Bob eliminated the in-game trainer menu and instead added a trainer menu at the start of the game (which means the player has to reload the game in order to change an option). He also released a re-packaged, fixed revision of Mihai's version of Manic Miner 128 based on the Software Projects edition.

The game's page on JSW Central is here, and the discussion and download links on Bob's website are here. A file with Mihai's original Z80 file and Bob's TAP files is attached to this message for your convenience.

Since from the comments there it seems like there may be still be some 'unfinished business' regarding "Manic Miner 128" (bugs?), I am planning to playtest both of Bob's versions in the near future and report back with the results 🙂 . If anyone has a go at them and notices any issues, please let us know!

Manic_Miner_128.zip

[jetsetdanny]

All right, I have playtested both of Bob's versions from start to finish (also losing lives in every cavern just to check what happens) and I can confirm that they are both perfectly completable. I did not notice any bugs or problems.

The only thing I could mention is that in the Software Projects version (i.e. Bob's bugfix and conversion to TAP format of Mihai's original Z80 file) the remaining lives are not 'dancing', regardless of whether the music is on or off. That's just a feature of this version I guess, though.

A great thank you to Bob for creating a bugfixed version of Mihai's original AY music version and for creating a separate 128K music version using the Bug-Byte edition of the game! 🙂 👍

[Spider]

I was sent this a coulpe of months ago , and played it a bit but then completely forgot about it as real life took over. 😞 🙂

[jetsetdanny]

You are acknowledged on the second page of Bob's introduction in the Bug-Byte version 🙂 .

[Richard Hallas]

For what it's worth… I am Mr Scratcher. (It's just an old nickname that I sometimes use online.) I stumbled across Bob Fossil's conversion of Manic Miner 128 to .tap format and was delighted to find it. But on playing it through, I found that it crashed in Skylab Landing Bay. I contacted him to let him know about the problem, and this led to his creating the two nice new versions that we now have. (He gave me a decent real-name credit in his new Bug-Byte version's loader.) You can read the correspondence in its entirety on his dedicated blog page: The Fossil Record: Room for Improvements.

[jetsetdanny]

Thank you for this contribution, Richard! 🙂