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

 

 

Previous message		Next message

 

 

Message: 4086

Author: andrewbroad

Date: 16/04/2004

Subject: Re: JSW64 / PW128 / John Elliott's JSWED

 

john_elliott_uk wrote:

>
>> Two ramps in "The Bathroom", apparently 14 elementary block-
>> types,
>
> Guess again :-)

My guess is that there are 16 elementary block-types (rather than
the four in JSW48: namely air, water, earth, fire - or as I call
them: background, floor, wall and static nasty). I originally
supposed that the two ramps really were two ramps rather than made
up of elementary block-types, but the following experiment suggests
otherwise:

java ASCII jsw64_4.tap 50176 51199 32 -o

>>>

The Bathroom
6 @)d?-??.?? U?U ??
'# , 0 ? =? ? ?_$!?_("
?$*w???*" ';
!d00 ? ;

?





..____________________________..
..____________________________..
..____________________________..
______________________________..
______________________________..
6666666666666__''.666666666666..
._____________''_.____________..
.____________''__.____________..
.___________''___.____________..
.__________''____.____________..
._________''_____.____________..
.________''______.____________..
._______''_______.____________..
______666_____________________..
__/7?'/7?>=<________====______..
666666666666666666666666666666..
<<<
(I added the '_'s by hand because Yahoo! would automatically remove
the spaces.)

In the above ASCII dump, '/', '?' and ''' refer to more than one
colour-attribute, since my ASCII function takes the command-line
flag -o to tell it to add 32 to ASCII codes 0-31 in order to make
the screen-layout visible.

So "The Bathroom" uses 15 of the 16 elementary block-types?

>> Why "jsw64"?
>> Clearly more than 64K in total.
>> 64 rooms?
>> 64K of room-data?
>
> 64 rooms was what I had in mind.

JSW48 has 64 rooms too! ;-)

> If I ever write one with 128 rooms,
> I'll be a bit stuck for ideas as to what to call it.

Perhaps JSW64 should be renamed JSW128x4 to indicate that it's 128K
but distinguish it from the JSW128 with 256 rooms at 256 bytes each?
Likewise, a JSW128 game with 128 rooms at 512 bytes per room could
be called JSW128x2. I can't think of more elegant titles than those.

> Be warned that the room format in the uploaded version is by no
> means final. The uploaded version follows the original JSW quite
> closely, but there's a much neater layout which I'm using in my
> development version. So while you may have fun working out what
> I've done, don't start writing JSW64 editors just yet!

Don't worry - it'll be a very long time before JSW CK supports
anything other than the standard 48K JSW format! (I plan to extend
MMSE in the future to support your MM patch.)


Two important firsts happened for me yesterday:
1. The JSW128 version of Party Willy came into existence.
2. I installed and ran JSWED for the first time.

I used JSWED to upgrade Party Willy (Part 2) to JSW128:

- It would be nice to have a function to merge up to four 48K JSW
games into one JSW128 game.

+ I was impressed that JSWED recognised PWp2 as "Andrew Mode"!
Presumably it recognised my patch to specify the player's sprite-
page in Offset 237?

- Willy's remaining lives face left, presumably because I swapped
the two halves of Sprite-Page 157 to make my patch work.

+ I was also impressed that it retained my other ad-hoc hacks, such
as the 24-hour clock. I'd always imagined that only the recognised
data would be transferred.

- It would be nice for the title-screen and the two tunes to be
converted to JSW128 format, rather than starting PW128 with the
original JSW128 title-screen and tunes (I would like to code up two
parts of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as the PW128 tunes, but I might
not have time before 23rd April).

- Why did it clear Rooms 62 and 63? I managed to restore them by
hand with no apparent problems.


I've read through the JSWED v2.0.3 user-guide. I have some issues
with what I read, but I'll wait until I've actually tried editing
games before I raise them - although it does seem to use the
term "guardian" for both "guardian-instance" and "guardian-class".

It should be most intriguing to investigate the relative merits of
JSWED and JSW CK (and other JSW-editors).

--
Dr. Andrew Broad
http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/
http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/
http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/willy/
http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/download/

 

 

	Back to the Yahoo! Archive
Previous message	home page	Next message