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Message: 5899

Author: andrewbroad

Date: 18/08/2006

Subject: Re: Willy's Hoard

 

Firstly, I'd like to say how impressed I am with the technical
innovations in Willy's Hoard. At first glance, it looks like the
work of a seasoned Z80 machine-code programmer! :-)

Secondly, the Quirky Spoiler PNG-file is an awesome effort - it must
have taken endless hours! I would never have time to do such myself.
I must study it with a view to ideas for Advanced MM/JSW Trainer...

Daniel wrote:

II. Background Information

Ever since I first played "Henry's Hoard"
( http://www.worldofspectrum.org/games/h.html) , I was impressed by
the atmosphere and quality of its rooms. I always felt sad that
these fine rooms did not form part of the "official" Miner Willy
canon, which for me is Dr. Andrew Broad's list of released Manic
Miner and Jet Set Willy games
( http://www.geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/willy/list.html) .
Since the original "Henry's Hoard" uses a heavily-modified JSW
game engine, it is not included in any of the JSW game categories
Dr. Broad currently recognises (MM, JSW, JSW128 and JSW64), and it
is only mentioned in the "Other Games of MM/JSW Interest" section.

It's a controversial issue, whether Henry's Hoard should be
recognised as a JSW48 game, considering how heavily it is based on
the JSW game-engine and room-format.

There are two main objections against recognising it as JSW:

1. It was never claimed to be a JSW game when it was released -
unlike every single game in the JSW, JSW128 and JSW64 categories.

2. The file-formats are so complicated that I never got round to
preparing the data-sheets to type Henry's Hoard into my real
Spectrum. In fact, the current revision of SPECSAISIE doesn't even
recognise HENRY85.TAP and HENRY86.TAP as valid TAP-files!

In the latter part of this creative process I grew used to
operating in hexadecimal rather than decimal values, and I started
using JSWED's Hex editor, which I found to be in some ways more
handy than Warajevo. When I do similar editing in the future, I
will most certainly use JSWED's Hex editor again. However, I will
still need Warajevo (or another program) to convert decimal values
to hexadecimal if I want to apply POKEs given in denary.

I find my pocket-calculator very handy for converting between denary
and hexadecimal (why does no one ever say "bicimal" or "hexadenary",
I wonder?). When I create the POKEs page for my website, I plan to
give all POKEs in both bases.

P.S. A note to Dr. Andrew Broad:

a) I would like to kindly suggest that "JSW48:JGH" would be a good
abbreviation to describe the game on your merged list, since the
most notable feature of the game is that it has more than 64
rooms, and it's thanks to J. G. Harston's extension.

The way I see it, increasing the number of rooms is just a single
patch, and does not therefore warrant an elaborated type-
descriptor. Having a symbol for every single patch would be a bit
over the top...

Geoff-mode and Erix1-mode do warrant elaborated type-descriptors,
because the game-engines are very heavily modified from the standard
JSW48 engine - although not so much as to warrant their own
categories à la JSW128 and JSW64.

We're not at the stage where we can just slice out the individual
patches that convert the standard JSW48 engine to Geoff-mode or
Erix1-mode, so that they can be applied individually to arbitrary
JSW48 games.

b) Apparently there is a spelling mistake on the World of Spectrum
website in the name of one of the co-authors of "Henry's Hoard".
His name (according to the game files themselves, both versions)
is not the properly-Anglo-Saxon "Biggs", but "Bigos", which
(probably by coincidence) looks very familiar to me, because it's
a word for one of the delightful, typical Polish dishes (boiled
sauerkraut with meat and sausages) :-) .

I'm not convinced that it should be "Bigos", even though this
apparent typo occurs in two separate places in the 1985 version.

The Crash review calls him "Biggs", which seems like a perfectly
plausible English name to me. So I'm going to leave it as "Biggs"
unless I see evidence for "Bigos" which is more than 50% convincing.

Why do you think that his first name is Andy? I didn't spot this
name by following any of the links from WOS. For all I know,
"A. Biggs" could be the Alan Biggs who wrote the Progen utility
(Gensoft, 1988).

To answer my own question, the scrolly on the MicroHobby tape
says "ANDY BIGOS" - it's a different scrolly again from the 1985 and
1986 versions!

And is this one different occurrence of "BIGOS" too many to be
coincidence?

"Mr Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: 'Once is happenstance,
twice is coincidence, the third time it's enemy action.'"
[Ian Fleming, _Goldfinger_]

c) It seems to me that only two, not three versions of "Henry's
Hoard" exist, one from 1985 and the other from 1986. Three
versions used to be listed on WoS, but now they have corrected it
and only two remain.

In light of this, I have updated my local copy of my List of MM/JSW
Games to say "At least two different versions of Henry's Hoard
exist". But I do remember downloading a third different version from
1987, which my Mac took to its grave in 2003!

I guess the third version was probably the one from the MicroHobby
tape, which starts by saying it's the 1986 version, but then says
copyright 1987 in the scrolly.

I hope to upload my updated List of MM/JSW Games by the end of this
weekend, but I still have 39 messages left to process, and other
commitments...

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

 

 

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