Resource centre for ZX Spectrum games
using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines
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Message: 5049
Author: john_elliott_uk
Date: 15/11/2005
Subject: Re: Digest Number 772
--- In manicminerandjetsetwilly@yahoogroups.com, "Jeremy Cooper"
> The original engines (including the 64 variant) are just fine.
If I decided to port JSW to a newer platform, my reasons for so
> Those pixel-perfect jumps you have to sometimes perform, that
> unmistakeable jumping sound. A modernized PC game would only
> take away everything that make's this retro-feeling so enjoyable.
> And conversely, if you tried to make it identical, then there
> wouldn't be much point in making it in the first place.
doing would be:
i) More memory. The 128k engines alleviate this problem to some
extent, but not entirely. It would be possible to improve matters a
little more without going outside the bounds of the Spectrum, by
targeting the +3 exclusively.
ii) More colours. The Spectrum's only got 15.
iii) More tile types. To some extent this ties in to (i), because
simple combinations like crumbling ramps or conveyor trampolines are
just a matter of adding the code (at the expense of, say, a page of
sprites). But at most there can be 16, and there are already 10.
iv) More guardian behaviours (including non-lethal guardians). As
above, simple ones could be added to JSW64 (the data format allows 7
more guardian types) at the expense of memory for sprites. More
complex designs (such as a proper circular path rather than the fake
one in the JSW64 Clock Tower) would want more processing horsepower.
v) An easier scripting language. Currently anyone wanting to extend a
game with custom logic has to do it in Z80 machine code and a lot of
people don't seem to get on very well with it.
vi) Copyright. If the current rights owners did decide to suppress
distribution of the original JSW, there's not a lot we could do.
Unfortunately, if we want to be legally bomb-proof, then no-one who's
seen disassembly of the original could work on the copy. Good luck,
guys, sorry I can't help :-)
> They have made new versions in the past, for the Amiga, the
And in order for a PC game to match the success of the original, it
> Gameboy and some for Windows. But we all keep coming back
> to the original engine because we are so familiar with it
> and fond of it.
would need to match the original in the areas of:
* Customisability. The internals of JSW are very well understood, and
creating new levels should be no harder than it is now with JSWED.
Most of the existing ports only play the original levels or at most a
few alternate sets.
* Bug-for-bug compatibility. The hypothetical new system would have to
match just about every characteristic of Spectrum JSW; even getting as
close as JSW2 does wouldn't cut it. Being able to import and play an
untouched copy of 'We Pretty' OTOH...
It's been done for other games. The example I'm thinking of is Tile
World, an open-source clone of Chip's Challenge. A lot of custom
levels had already been written for CC, and several of them depended
on quirks in Microsoft's version of the game engine (which bears
rather less relation to the original Lynx version than JSW2 does to
JSW). Tile World, as well as replicating both the Microsoft and the
original Lynx game engines, also has 256-colour graphics where the
original had 16.
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