The Attic Bug - a thought

[IRF]

I just had a thought - is it theoretically possible to complete the original Jet Set Willy without applying any POKES, not even the four officially released ones?

The Attic Bug corrupts the game data and code in unpredictable ways, so unpredictable that the effects are different every time you play the game. Might it be possible in theory that one effect could be to corrupt the list of guardians in both Conservatory Roof and First Landing, creating an arrow which passes along the character row where the items are located in each of those rooms (an invisible item, in the latter case).

Were that to happen, then the white INK of the arrow would auto-collect the items that otherwise can't be collected without using the official POKES, and so the unPOKED game could in theory be completed (provided Willy can manage to complete his journey through the corrupted mansion without one of the many other side-effects of the Attic Bug getting him!)

Edited October 3 by IRF

[DigitalDuck]

The effects aren't unpredictable and aren't different every time you play - the arrow's trajectory is consistent and writes to the same bytes every time.

To be precise, it corrupts the flying bird, UFO, Esmerelda, giant head, skull, sunflower, and Andre enemies, and any room those enemies can be found in result in the guardians being misplaced and (depending on the room) embedded into walls (which automatically kills Willy on room entry). None of those enemies can be found in First Landing, The Banyan Tree, or Conservatory Roof, the rooms that would need changes in order to make completion possible.

It's possible to complete Jet Set Willy without fixing the Attic bug, though - you can apply the other three POKEs (42183,11; 56876,4; and 60231,0), play the game as normal making sure to only climb the East Wall and get the items in Priests' Hole and Dr Jones and head into the Attic once you have all of the other items. From the Attic, you can go Under the Roof -> Conservatory Roof -> Orangery -> Swimming Pool -> Banyan Tree (left to right - not easy!) -> The Nightmare Room -> First Landing -> Top Landing -> Master Bedroom and complete the game.

You can't complete it twice though, because the rooms with those enemies in don't become accessible again even after beating the game.

[IRF]

13 minutes ago, DigitalDuck said:

The effects aren't unpredictable and aren't different every time you play - the arrow's trajectory is consistent and writes to the same bytes every time.

To be precise, it corrupts the flying bird, UFO, Esmerelda, giant head, skull, sunflower, and Andre enemies, and any room those enemies can be found in result in the guardians being misplaced and (depending on the room) embedded into walls (which automatically kills Willy on room entry). None of those enemies can be found in First Landing, The Banyan Tree, or Conservatory Roof, the rooms that would need changes in order to make completion possible.

I've seen a walk through where various cheat POKES had been applied, and the corruption progressively got worse (until the machine eventually rebooted). So I think other corruption is possible. Perhaps as a kind of chain reaction. (If a guardian or arrow is corrupted at an earlier stage, then when it is drawn with misdirected coordinates, it too could trample across data or code, and cause further corruption.)

[Jet Set Willie]

9 hours ago, IRF said:

I've seen a walk through where various cheat POKES had been applied, and the corruption progressively got worse (until the machine eventually rebooted). So I think other corruption is possible. Perhaps as a kind of chain reaction. (If a guardian or arrow is corrupted at an earlier stage, then when it is drawn with misdirected coordinates, it too could trample across data or code, and cause further corruption.)

Could it be possible that those cheat Pokes have corrupted the corrupted parts even more?

[DigitalDuck]

The corrupted guardians can cause corruptions themselves, but in an unpoked game Willy would just instantly die on entering those rooms preventing the enemies from corrupting the game further. The cheat POKEs in the video I saw were to prevent deaths from guardians, allowing them to cause further corruption.

[Spider]

The walkthoughts were possibly (likely?) mine, I've done several.

Certain rooms however when the bug is in effect do seem to make it deteriorate a bit faster, notably "Inside the MegaTrunk" , staying here and switching emulation speed up a bit (200% is fine) you'll see the status bar start to corrupt. Kitchens can have a similar effect, although the guardians moving horizontally at that stage is erm distracting.

 

A sidenote about the other "big three" bugs: I think half or most of the battle is Banyan Tree, if it were possible to jump from the left side and catch onto a water cell without hitting a guardian, you could then climb it. The "First Landing" object something would have to be done or the item count adjusted to ignore it, same perhaps as "Conservatory Roof"