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Message: 6087
Author: andrewbroad
Date: 09/03/2007
Subject: Re: Feelings / Unused GCs / cat / Mini-games
Daniel wrote:
>I can't imagine my feelings for MM/JSW editing ever fading, even if I
> The magic of Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner for the Spectrum will
> exist as long (and only as long, I am afraid) as there are people
> who feel it, take delight in it (by both playing and designing, or
> at least either thing) and want to dedicate their time to it. When
> our feelings for JSW/MM fade, and no new JSW/MM-lovers emerge, the
> little fellow and his enchanting world will be dead...
don't have time to act on those feelings. In fact, my passion for
MM/JSW has been growing in recent weeks, as I'm finally (for the
first time since May 2006) beginning to get on top of my backlogs and
reduce them faster than they're growing :-)
Sometimes I wish that I could live forever, so as not to miss any
future MM/JSW!
> I hope this moment is still a LONG time away, though. Sendy onceSo would I. In fact, prior to discovering the Spectrum-emulation
> said, if I remember correctly, that she would continue to create
> JSW games even if she were the last person to do it.
scene in 1996, I always assumed I was the /only/ person hacking
MM/JSW!
Having taken the first step of ASCIIfying Manic Miner in late 1991,
my MM/JSW activity had stopped by 1995, but received an amazing boost
the day I thought to type "spectrum" into AltaVista, and discovered a
world I never knew existed!
> Whenever I work on a game, I keep a list of all guardian-classesJSW CK is more helpful than JSWED in this regard. It lets you step
> used in the game, so I know which ones are free.
>
> If I were to tackle a game which is work in progress (not mine), in
> this day and age which for me is still the before-the-SPECSAISIE
> era ( :-( ) , I would just load it into JSWED and, going room by
> room, take note of all of the guardian-classes used, and then I
> would know which ones haven't been used yet.
through the guardian-class table, showing you which guardian-classes
are cleared (guardian-type 0).
JSW CK won't tell you immediately if a guardian-class has no
instances in any room in the game (e.g. GCs 43 and 63 in the original
JSW), but you can find out by pressing 'F' for each guardian-class.
(For those who don't know, JSW CK is my Spectrum-based Jet Set Willy
Construction Kit, which is downloadable from
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/download/ )
Instead of pressing 'F' in JSW CK for every guardian-class, you could
use the following BASIC program:
10 FOR g= 0 TO 126
20 FOR r= 49152 TO 65535 STEP 256
30 FOR i= 240 TO 255 STEP 2
40 LET t= PEEK (r+i)
50 IF t = 255 THEN GO TO 80
60 IF t = g THEN GO TO 100
70 NEXT i
80 NEXT r
90 PRINT "Guardian-class ";g;" has no instances"
100 NEXT g
But installing a Java-compiler and then SPECSAISIE is better still!
> 3. A note to AndrewI am working my way through each SPECSAISIE-function in turn, adding
>
> If I understand correctly (without having used it yet), SPECSAISIE
> shows the unused guardian-classes in decimal (in your example,
> e.g., Guardian-Class 124, Guardian-Class 125, Guardian-Class 126,
> etc.). Would it not be more convenient if it showed them in
> hexadecimal, because that's the way you see them in JSWED, isn't it?
a command-line flag -h to allow the user to tell it to show numerical
values in the output in hexadecimal. Unfortunately I haven't added -h
to UnusedGCsJSW yet.
> What is the program "cat" and where can it be downloaded from?It's a generic file-concatenation program, which may be preinstalled
on some platforms (type "cat" at a Command Prompt to see if the
command is recognised). I believe I downloaded my installation
of "cat" from http://www.openetwork.com/berk.html
I have also written a Java program to concatenate files, though the
command-line is a little more cumbersome:
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/cs/java/cat.html
> One of the characteristic features of the present busy days seemsI actually quite like the concept of mini-games. As an author, it
> to be a proliferation of mini-games. It's a pity that they are not
> big projects, but still - every single JSW game and room is
> welcome, IMO :-) .
feels good to have little projects in the pipeline as well as the
daunting AMJT which is holding up my other major games.
And as a player in this busy day and age, sometimes it's nice to be
able to take a ten-minute break rather than starting a game that will
definitely take more than an hour to complete.
Radiohead once said that they were so disillusioned with the concept
of albums that they were considering just releasing a series of EPs.
Sometimes I wonder whether that wouldn't be a smart move for a JSW-
author.
--
Dr. Andrew Broad
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/
http://geocities.com/andrewbroad/spectrum/willy/
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