No end product.
By Ely

It started as a simple enough project - write Manic Miner for the PC in Blitz Basic 2D. It had already been done successfully by someone else, but to do it yourself means a lot more satisfaction and that's partly the point of homebrew for me. So I started and got to a point where I had Mr. Willy wandering back and forth and even jumping up and down. “This is easy”, I thought. Things however are never as easy at they seem.

There's a good reason why people write original games and as I was quickly learning I now knew why. You try and work out how a three frame animation of a 10 pixel wide Miner graphic walks along inside a 16 pixel box and always ends up at the same spot whether walking in either direction. Want to know how I did it? Well I ain't telling because frankly it's too boring. That was only the first step (or steps, ha-ha) to making it work though. How do collapsing blocks work? Don't ask me I never figured it out. How does jumping into a solid block affect your downward motion? I haven't the foggiest - I never figured that out either.

You wouldn’t believe the stress this little graphic caused.

So you're probably thinking at this point, “You didn't achieve much did you?” But you'd be wrong. In the end I did what I always end up doing when things get tricky - I went and did other aspects of the game instead.

The biggest part of this project was always going to be reproducing all twenty levels. Now everyone knows that Manic Miner was made famous on the Sinclair Spectrum, but how many people know that it was released on almost every other 8-Bit Platform of the era twelve months later? Well it was and I should know because we didn't have a Spectrum, no we had a Dragon 32 and yes I bought Manic Miner for it. Even in only black and white the Dragon version has something the original didn't: two extra screens. In a time when size was everything, especially for Mr Willy, having twenty two screens should have been something of a revelation. But twelve months on from the Speccy original it was hardly a major talking point in the playground. Everyone else was busy gorging themselves on the sixty four screens of Jet Set Willy!

See it really does exist, a Dragon original.

This knowledge I'd had for twenty years hatched a rather cunning plan to add value to my version of Manic Miner. I would offer the player a chance to select a 'platform version' to play on that would give these extra screens the time in the spotlight they deserved. So what you're thinking now though is, “but that only adds two crappy black and white screens from the Dragon version, blimey, that's worth a download isn't it?” You'd have a point, but you see with this internet thing and the popularity of Manic Miner still fresh in thirty year old gamers’ minds I found a wealth of information that lead me to believe that not only did the Dragon version have extra screens but so too did the BBC B, Amstrad CPC, MSX and Oric versions. Even more digging finds versions of the game for the well remembered Tatung Einstein and also the infamous SAM Coupe.

So now rather than spend ages debugging code to make it do something I didn't understand I found myself trawling the depths of emulation to get screenshots of these long forgotten extra screens instead. Fortunately for the BBC and Amstrad CPC there are capable Windows based emulators, but even then the need to find cheats for the games proved tricky, but eventually the grabs were made. I found screenshots of the Tatung screens on a Website somewhere and after a bit of searching even the SAM coupe version was up and running on an emulator, and let’s face it that the only way most people have seen this machine running.

The Oric however wasn't so easy. For starters there was a total of one emulator that seemed to play games, it was DOS based and tape interface was obviously designed in the 80s by the same people who thought the keyboard of the machine was ground breaking. So having struggled too many nights till the early hours to get the thing to load, I was then stuck with regards to getting the extra screens grabbed. Now the Oric version is special for two reasons: first, the programmer somehow managed to squeeze twelve totally new screens into it and second, he managed to make easily the worst version of Manic Miner you're ever likely to see. These special features aside it had no cheat mode, a rather painful problem given these extra screens start after the sixteenth original screen which meant there was no way of playing through to them. Only a masochist would want to suffer anymore than ten seconds of this dreadful version. Help however came from some guy on the net who'd written a bit of fancy code to run before you loaded the game. After another late night struggling to make the shoddy emulator to run this fancy code it was then possible to start the game at any screen.

The Amstrad Original.

A BBC Original.

And then the project stopped. I can’t remember why. Maybe I'd lost my enthusiasm for something I once loved but I was burnt out and the pressures of work mean you can't do homebrew stuff for ever without an end product. The files are still on my PC, as are the designs to make new levels and recreate existing ones. The Beta version of my game still lives on my Website but none of it has been touched for over 2 years.

Homebrew is great but leave it to sit for too long and it soon loses its fresh taste.

November 2005

Comments.