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Message: 4088

Author: john_elliott_uk

Date: 16/04/2004

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

 

Before I start, I'll announce to the world: JSW64 has been updated. It
now includes all the JSW128 features that make sense for it:
* Diagonal guardians
* Colour-cycling guardians
* Cheat mode
* Fancy title screen
* Custom font
* Pause bug is fixed.
etc. There have also been several mystery improvements.

The zipfile includes five variants (lettered V,W,X,Y and Z). They
should all play identically and look the same, except for the decor in
the Bathroom in variant Z.

In manicminerandjetsetwilly@yahoogroups.com, andrewbroad wrote:

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).

Not the case in the version you had. Now that I've updated JSW64,
I'd better explain a bit. Yesterday I had some more ideas about room
formats - four more ideas, to be precise. So JSW64.ZIP now contains
five different editions of JSW64. Variants V and W should support 128
rooms; Variants X, Y and Z support 64. The previously uploaded version
corresponds to variant Z, but with some of the fields in a different
order.

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

Umm, no. The original version had 6 block types, and the current
versions all have 8.

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.

I think I'll stick to JSW64, and pretend I meant "64k of room data".

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.)

The five room formats in the currently-uploaded JSW64 are heading
towards being final. There are a lot of spare bytes still to be used,
but I don't plan to move (eg) the room names or layouts again.

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

I'm not sure you could fit all the guardians from four JSW48 games
into one JSW128 game. You could probably do it with two; I seem to
recall doing that when merging JTJS in the first place.

+ 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?

Yes. It stops JSWED from applying the JSW128 version of that patch.

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

Correct again.

+ 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.

JSWED loads JSW128 code on top of the JSW48 engine rather than
importing data into an existing JSW128 engine. Thus if you've patched
bits which are the same in 48k and 128k mode, they stay patched. The
lives display, however, is different, so any patches there are trampled.

- 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).

I haven't looked at tune conversion or title screen conversion.
These are things which are done very differently between JSW128 and JSW48.

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

I'm not quite sure why, but it only imports 62 rooms. It's an easy
thing to fix (upgrade.cxx line 146). But before I do anything else
with JSWED, I want to rewrite it to use GNU Autoconf, and I've been
putting off the evil day for years.

 

 

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