JSW Central - Resource Centre for ZX Spectrum games based on Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines

Resource centre for ZX Spectrum games
using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines

Versions and minor mods of the original Manic Miner

Manic Miner 128

Authors: Mihai Novitchi / Bob Fossil

Year: 2004 (?) / 2022-2023

Language: English

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, Richard Hallas (posting as '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.

Download links