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using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines
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Message: 4410
Author: andrewbroad
Date: 23/08/2004
Subject: Re: JSW64: Manic Miner
john_elliott_uk wrote:
>What of JSW64 itself and JSW64:Dragon32? Will all three be gamma-
> I've uploaded a release candidate for JSW64: Manic Miner. Unless
> anyone finds any bugs in it, I'll declare it final.
released at the same time?
There's a bug in the conversion of MM vertical guardians to JSW64:
- In MM you set the start-sprite and it rotates through the four VG
sprites as you'd expect - hence the animation of different VGs can
be out of phase with each other.
- In JSW, however, the sprite to be displayed cycles constantly from
0 to 7, and is modified before printing by ANDing with the
animation-mask and ORing with the start-sprite. Thus 4-sprite
animations should always have a start-sprite of either 0 or 4.
Your conversion is most impressive - particularly the way the items
collected in a room are subtracted and put back when you lose a
life, and the way it handles dropping onto the item under the portal
in "Sixteenth Cavern".
However, it's not a 100% faithful conversion; here are the
differences I've noticed:
- Instead of a score, there's an item-count and a global clock.
Since you go back to "Central Cavern" after "The Final Barrier"
with 85 items, what's the maximum number of items you can collect?
And what happens at 1am?
- 128K tunes (and no attempt to put the red and cyan squares on the
correct keys on the piano during the playing of the title-screen
tune). I prefer the 48K in-game tune to the 128K conversion that
uses only one channel.
- When you complete a cavern, the air empties faster and at a higher
pitch than in MM.
- The JSW item-collection sound. I think it's cool to add this to a
MM game, and I might even try to code it up for MM: Allana Truman.
But a strictly faithful conversion would suppress it.
- The remaining lives animate even with the music off, which I've
always found annoying since I noticed it in JSW128.
- The pause-colours aren't present in MM.
- HGs which go left initially start (on the zeroth time-frame) on
Sprite 0 rather than Sprite 3. SPECSAISIE MMtoJSW moves their
start-columns one character to the right.
- Eugene's top boundary is one pixel higher than in MM, his bottom
boundary one pixel lower - and he stays at his boundaries for one
time-frame rather than two.
- The quirky feature whereby you can walk through walls at head-
height, jump through overhead wall-blocks, and land on the ledges
on the left of The Wine Cellar is present, unlike in MM.
- The items in "The Vat" and "The Warehouse" have the same PAPER as
background, rather than red and green PAPER respectively.
- The walls in the Kong-Beast rooms open from top to bottom instead
of from the middle outwards.
- The falling Kong Beast is drawn /after/ the portal, instead of
falling neatly behind the portal as in MM.
- Skylabs don't colour the platforms into which they crash.
- Willy faces left above the swordfish at the end.
- JSW is slightly slower than MM, and JSW64 is no exception.
- In most 48K MM/JSW games, pressing cursor-left/right causes Willy
to jump left/right. In JSW128 and JSW64, it causes him to jump
straight up.
--
Dr. Andrew Broad
http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/
http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/
http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/willy/
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