Manic Miner: The Lost Levels

[IRF]

I kind of had tongue in cheek when I made the 'Bonus Caverns option' comment. 😜

Although this discussion has led me to speculate that the primary motivation behind the development of the 'No Kamikaze option' in JSW64 was the need to accommodate the gameplay of Manic Miner in the engine, rather than it being devised as a novelty for JSW-style games (though that is a happy bonus).

[jetsetdanny]

On 6/14/2024 at 12:36 AM, IRF said:

I kind of had tongue in cheek when I made the 'Bonus Caverns option' comment. 😜

🙂 

On 6/14/2024 at 12:36 AM, IRF said:

Although this discussion has led me to speculate that the primary motivation behind the development of the 'No Kamikaze option' in JSW64 was the need to accommodate the gameplay of Manic Miner in the engine, rather than it being devised as a novelty for JSW-style games (though that is a happy bonus).

That's quite possible. And John Elliott could actually confirm it if he stumbles upon your comment one day.

[IRF]

Or maybe Andrew Broad or someone else from the Yahoo group from back in the day? Didn't John Elliott take suggestions from the Yahoo membership as he went along developing JSWED through several iterations over the years?

[jetsetdanny]

Andrew Broad made the following comments on the Yahoo! Group when he reviewed JSWED back in November 2005:

No Kamikaze
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An interesting name for what I would term "item-retention" if I could afford a wider window. 😉

"A sadistic game designer", eh? 😆

Bonus Room
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Did I read somewhere that the items in a Bonus Room don't count towards removing Maria? Sacrilege!

It's really cool that the screen colour-cycles when you get an extra life, as in Manic Miner.

Perhaps certain JSW games could give you an extra life after you've collected a certain number of items, or exceeded a certain score (to which points are awarded for collecting items and visiting rooms that you haven't visited before).

There's a bug (or useful quirky feature?) whereby erroneous colour-attributes appear in the playing-area if you acquire too many lives. These colour-attributes behave as Water unless associated with a cell-class (but unlike Custom cells, they don't cause the Cell-Class 1 pixel-pattern to appear).

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There are no other references in the Group posts that would shed any light on the issue in question. However, there was also a comment of yours, Ian, in February 2017:

Re: Patch to reset cells' FLASH-bits

Andrew wrote:

> (I encountered a bug in JSWED when setting "The Off Licence" to be a bonus-room: I ticked "Bonus room" in > "Room properties", but when I checked back there, it was unticked. When I playtested it, it /was/ a > bonus-room: the items gave me extra lives, without colour-cycling.)

I have experienced a similar problem; reopening the Options->Room menu causes the Bonus room box to be unticked (after having ticked it previously).  However, when I playtested it, it wasn't a bonus room (no extra lives and no colour-cycling).

The reason I returned to the Room Options menu was to tick the 'No Kamikaze' option, in order to have both options switched on in the same room.  I thought I would see what would happen if Willy collected all the items in a multi-item room, and then died before leaving the room!  The result: many extra lives, which eventually spilled over beyond the status bar and caused corruption across the range of addresses #58xx-#5Fxx (including the attribute file for the entire screen, the primary and secondary attribute buffers for the playing area and the stack - the latter of which eventually led to a system reset!!)

[IRF]

Thanks for those nuggets from the historical Yahoo! record, Danny!

So I obviously considered the scenario of a Bonus Room potentially causing lives overspill (and commented on it) before now!

11 hours ago, jetsetdanny said:

There's a bug (or useful quirky feature?) whereby erroneous colour-attributes appear in the playing-area if you acquire too many lives. These colour-attributes behave as Water unless associated with a cell-class (but unlike Custom cells, they don't cause the Cell-Class 1 pixel-pattern to appear).

But Andrew Broad's comment, as quoted above, foreshadowed it. The only aspect missing from Andrew's early analysis is that, if the in-game music is playing so that the spare lives are 'dancing', then the erroneous attributes in the playing area will cycle through different colours - because they represent individual graphical bytes of the current dancing Willy sprite, interpreted as colour-attributes.

And in certain circumstances, that periodic change in colour can affect the gameplay in different ways (e.g. an errant block might briefly - for one in every four game 'ticks' - become/stop being a Fire cell; or the blocks might auto-collect an embedded item - if the rightmost three pixels are infilled for a particular graphical byte, such as when one of Willy's feet is at a certain position, then this is interpreted as item-collecting white Ink!)

EDIT: I went down this particular rabbit-hole, and explored it for some time, back in February of this year in the 'Manic Miner: Highscore Challenge' discussion thread.

Edited June 16 by IRF

[The-Red-Bayron]

The 128K version is done !! Been busy testing it and putting in the changes the were suggested.

This is the Game map for all 28 levels;

Be careful with the lever in "Not Central Cavern" and be quick (very quick) to avoid the laser beams in "The Meteor Storm" and the "The Final BBC Barrier"

Mostly the Gameplay is the same as the two 48K versions but with improvements to the sprites and level graphics, the Readme file in the zip file covers what has changed with a little more detail.

There are extra lives to start with as it is a double game.

Anyway enough rambling !!

Hope you enjoy playing the game.

All the best, B

 

[jetsetdanny]

Thanks, Byron! I look forward to playing this version soon 🙂 .

[The-Red-Bayron]

Many thanks, I put in the extra items that you suggested in "The End Of The World" and "Eugene’s Other Lair".

All the best, B

[The-Red-Bayron]

The Lost Levels just had 

Downloads !!

Thanks to everyone for giving it a go, I am amazed that it has gone so well 

All the best, B

[MtM]

Red, thank you for this version of MM, I really like it, the difficulty level is spot on! Excellent, I have been

playing it, just right for me!