Resource centre for ZX Spectrum games
using Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy game engines
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Manic Miner & Jet Set Willy Yahoo! Group
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Message: 5431
Author: andrewbroad
Date: 12/01/2006
Subject: strangel: andrew's fifth playtest / SPECSAISIE
this message follows on from message 5429.
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room-specific comments
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[34] "not Everyone's Cup Of T": that seemingly unreachable rope
giving access to "NUCLEAR c@s GeT new HOME" [36] (which i thought
was purely aesthetic because i didn't have my lateral-thinking cap
on) is one wicked trick! i had to go in deep, using SPECSAISIE
RoomReachJSW, to find a way into [36] - this is the only way to
collect all the items in [36] itself, "MicroVILLi" [37] and "i
nformation" [46], which i thought for a long time was impossible! :-)
[37] "MicroVILLi": the most spectacular use of invalid-arrow pairs
in the game, to create narrow, fast-moving platforms which in turn
inspired the technical design of goodnite luddite's "APOCRYPHALLY
APOSTOLIC APOSTASY!" and "STATIONS OF THE KNIFE".
[45] "Noted": who would have thought diagonal guardians would have
opened up such a new field of quirky features? (erroneous colour-
attributes in rows 0 & 1, which behave as water, thus nullifying
some earth- and fire-cells).
_____i can't tell you how long i spent trying to find a way from the
top middle to the top right before i discovered the secret of [34]!
[46] "i nformation": another room which drove me mad for a long
time until i discovered the secret of [34], as i could only collect
one item and kamikaze another.
_____in fact this room is a prime example of items which are easy to
kamikaze, but much more challenging and satisfying to collect
without sacrificing a life.
_____the room requires a couple of very tight jumps under vertical
guardians, and i find it most intriguing that exiting this room to
the left - which looks like one of those unintentional loopholes i
see so often in others' games - is the only way out of the
[36,37,44,45,46] cluster.
phantom giZmos: 250 Tyme 2:08pm
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SPECSAISIE
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RoomReachJSW is an inverse lookup-function that tells you the direct
connections to a given JSW room - the exits TO that room, not FROM
it.
RoomReachJSW is written for 48K JSW games: currently it iterates
over 64 rooms only, and does not recognise John Elliott's teleport-
patch either.
But RoomReachJSW can be applied to JSW128 games by calling it for
each of the four banks of 64 rooms separately (after using
SPECSAISIE Split 3 6 to extract them as individual TAP files). The
target room-number (the input to the function) is the same in every
bank, but the source room-numbers (printed by the function) have to
be offset by 0, 64, 128 or 192.
I do intend to write a proper version of RoomReachJSW that handles
JSW128 and JSW64, but first I have to implement SPECSAISIE's model
of 128K memory, and methods for loading 128K SNA files and
JSW128/JSW64 TAP files into SPECSAISIE, not to mention a bank:offset
notation that can be used anywhere that an address is expected.
Today I wrote SPECSAISIE TeleportJSW, which lists the teleporters in
a JSW48 or JSW128 game that uses John Elliott's teleport-patch. Some
of that code will eventually help RoomReachJSW to recognise
teleporters.
--
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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