'Willy Meets The Beatles' - bugfix

[jetsetdanny]

"Willy Meets The Beatles" is a 2012 JSW game by Simon D. Lee (TechnicianSi), with music created by Paolo Arus (DarkHorace). This excellent tribute to the legendary band of the 1960s was originally released in January 2012, in TZX and Z80 format, followed by a bug-fixed revision in April 2012.

Unfortunately, the last officially released bug-fixed revision still contained one critical bug that went unnoticed for over a decade, even though an RZX recording of the game was published by Pavel Plíva (Pavero) on the RZX Archive immediately after the revision's release (incidentally, this recording features an unnecessary loss of life in "Candlestick Park" [28]). The issue occurred with the right exit from the room "End of an Era" (59), where the toilet run begins. This exit was mistakenly set to loop back to the same room. As a result, during the toilet run, Willy would repeatedly re-enter the room on the left after exiting on the right, instead of proceeding to the intended final room, "Free as a Bird" (60). This room was clearly meant to serve as the ending, as evidenced by its content — "The End" and "Thank You For Playing" — and by Simon's comment on WoS, where he referred to "Free as a Bird" as "the final screen".

I discovered this problem after completing the game and recording an RZX walkthrough for my JSW Central YouTube channel. When I worked on updating the information on the game's page on JSW Central, I suddenly realised Pavel's recording didn't show the correct ending, and then I realised that the last officially released revision of the game had the right-exit-in-Room-59 problem.

I have corrected it (by modifying the value at address #ECEA in Memory Bank 6 from #3B to #3C, thus setting the right exit from "End of an Era" to "Free as a Bird") and prepared a bug-fixed version of the game in TZX and Z80 format (both are the original release formats). The fixed version can be downloaded from "Willy Meets The Beatles" page on JSW Central.

I also re-recorded the game and made a video of it, which you can see on the JSW Central YouTube channel.

I would strongly encourage everyone to play the game, especially if you are fond of The Beatles. It's quite easy in terms of gameplay. It really sticks to the theme and it features excellent music ("Back in the USSR" on the title screen and "Lady Madonna" as the in-game tune), played using SoundTracker. It was the first JSW64 game to utilise this solution. In fact, the game's development inspired John Elliott to release version 2.3.5 of JSWED, which introduced the option to replace Ian Collier's default JSW64 music player with the SoundTracker player by BZYK (Piotr Baczkiewicz).

[manic986]

Awesome! Looking forward to trying this out. My 8 year found Jet Set Willy for the first time yesterday and he was playing it on the laptop while I was working. He was playing a Javascript emulator version that he found. I was highly amused. 

[jetsetdanny]

You've got a brilliant son!!! 😁

[manic986]

Well, one thing is for sure. This version of Jet Set Willy is brilliant. The music is great and some of the artwork is amazing. Very cool.