Why was Manic Miner never properly optimised?

[jetsetdanny]

19 minutes ago, IRF said:

Danny is suggesting (perhaps as a pipe dream, but I believe in a positive, non-critical spirit) that someone [else, if not yourself] might at some point create an editor which runs on a PC or other similar platform, incorporating a user-friendly GUI, and into which 48KB MM game files (optimised as per your recent upload) could be loaded and edited by Joe Bloggs.

That was exactly my intention, in a positive, non-critical spirit 🙂 .

[IRF]

6 hours ago, jetsetdanny said:

And this, I believe, suggests that it is not the 20-rooms-only limit that has prevented people from creating more MM-style games, but rather some other factors.

I guess many people like to stick to the 48K limit. (If you're going 'retro' with your games, then you may as well go the whole hog, and the 128K Spectrum came later than old rubber keys - although the ZX81 was even earlier, its 16KB limit perhaps takes that concept too far/limits the size of the games too much?) If you add up the MM(48) and JSW48 mods from your list above, they amount to about two-thirds of the total (with JSW128 and JSW64 games collectively only making up about a third).

So with that in mind - now that Norman Sword has managed to devise an optimised MM game engine which allows significantly more caverns within the 48KB constraint (how many more exactly? I don't believe Norman specified?), perhaps more such modified, more expansively cavernous games might be forthcoming in future?

Edited February 7 by IRF

[DigitalDuck]

Manic Miner Redux supports many thousands of rooms.

(What? The original post never mentioned "Spectrum"...)

[Norman Sword]

On 2/8/2024 at 6:56 PM, DigitalDuck said:

Manic Miner Redux supports many thousands of rooms.

(What? The original post never mentioned "Spectrum"...)

Was not aware Matthew wrote any other versions. Ist line I wrote

Apologies to the original person who modified Matthews code. (see below)

 

[Spider]

Must say even with one small change to how the four main copy routines are done in the main loop, the relative speed increase is quite impressive all in all. JSW did not quite seem "as fast" doing the same however it did make a large difference still.

[jetsetdanny]

Could you provide the code you are referring to? I mean what exactly needs to be modified and how.

[Spider]

On 4/24/2024 at 4:06 PM, jetsetdanny said:

Could you provide the code you are referring to? I mean what exactly needs to be modified and how.

The above 'test file' ( while I learned, thank you N.S! 🙂 ) has the following changes (excluding cosmetics like loading picture and slightly altered piano on title screen)

The main change is to the four main copy routines which originally used LDIR in the main loop are now replaced with a routine using a number of LDI's resulting in an increase in speed. These copy routines being:

Copy master attributes to attribute buffer , 512 bytes

Copy master screen pixels to screen buffer , 4096 bytes

Copy pixels from screen buffer to real screen , 4096 bytes

Copy attributes from attribute buffer to real screen , 512 bytes

The relative increase in speed is quite noticeable. 🙂 

 

The only other changes were three small insignificant ones:

Willy faces the correct way upon entry on each cavern

The highscore is preset to 010000 instead of 000000

Amoebatron's Revenge conveyor is alive.

These are something I'd automatically do anyway, probably.

 

EDIT... Update:

New loading screen (as logo then full) , Andy Green 2018

Item collection sound (not in exactly the same place as other games)

Score status line flicker reduced (not eliminated but reduced)

Demo mode now plays the full ingame tune per cavern instead of half of it

Pressing BREAK during gameplay will update the highscore if its new

MM_SP_Faster V2.tap

No other changes, plenty I want to do but it is a demo/basic building block for others.

Edited May 5 by Spider
Much typo (first edit) ... Updated (second edit)

[MtM]

Just been playing this, through to Attack of the Mutant Telephones on my first go, very smooth and playable, thanks

Andy!

 

[jetsetdanny]

Thanks for the file, Andy! 🙂 It does run visibly faster than the original.*

* One thing that has always puzzled me is why some people are so excited about speeding MM and JSW up (there have been various attempts to do it, some admittedly very successful), while others complain that these (and many newly created MM/JSW) games are so difficult. It seems to be a contradiction. If you take a difficult game (where manual dexterity is involved) and make it run faster, it will be even more difficult. So anyone who thinks these games are difficult (and they are, *unless* you use Rollback, for example), should be thinking of slowing them down rather than speeding them up. That's what I think would be logical, at least...

[DigitalDuck]

27 minutes ago, jetsetdanny said:

Thanks for the file, Andy! 🙂 It does run visibly faster than the original.*

* One thing that has always puzzled me is why some people are so excited about speeding MM and JSW up (there have been various attempts to do it, some admittedly very successful), while others complain that these (and many newly created MM/JSW) games are so difficult. It seems to be a contradiction. If you take a difficult game (where manual dexterity is involved) and make it run faster, it will be even more difficult. So anyone who thinks these games are difficult (and they are, *unless* you use Rollback, for example), should be thinking of slowing them down rather than speeding them up. That's what I think would be logical, at least...

Making something run more efficiently doesn't have to mean speeding it up - it can be used to make the game run at a smooth speed (syncing to display refresh and counting frames) instead of speeding up when there are less enemies and slowing down when there are more, or add other more complex elements to the game.

Personally I think somewhere between original Manic Miner's Central Cavern with music off (about 12fps) and the GBA version (20fps) is a good speed, which is why I set the default speed to 15fps in Redux.