Dr. Andrew Broad
Sinclair ZX Spectrum
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Jet Set Willy II Conversion-Project

This new page relates to MM<->JSW conversion to and from Jet Set Willy II.

Converting JSW II to other room-formats

In 1993, I was planning to convert Jet Set Willy II: The Final Frontier to the MM and JSW I formats, just as I did convert between MM and JSW I (the results of which can be seen in my Party Willy box-set, and Java-programs for doing so can be found in the beta-version of SPECSAISIE in the Files section of the Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy Yahoo! Group - you have to join the Group first).

MM: JSW II was going to be a seven-volume MM game, presenting the 126 rooms in the order in which they appear in attract-mode (which is different from their technical room-numbers, and there are eight rooms that don't appear in attract-mode, of which the only room from JSW I is "The Off Licence", which is why I decided to put it in Manic Miner: The Buddha of Suburbia). The remaining 14 rooms in Volume 7 were going to do for David Bowie's Black Tie White Noise album what I did do for The Buddha Of Suburbia.

JSW: JSW II was going to be a three-volume 48K JSW I game:

• Volume 1 was going to be the 60 standard JSW rooms, edited to be as close as possible to how they appear in JSW II.
• Volume 2 was going to be all the new rooms from JSW II that aren't set in space, with link-rooms written by me. The start-room would be "Main Entrance (The Sewer)".
• Volume 3 (aka Manic Major, starring Major Willy) was going to be all the space-themed rooms from JSW II. The start-room would be "Docking Bay".

Now that we have JSW64, it could be so much better than it would have been, although I'd still have to consider a JSW128 version if I wanted a single-volume game covering all 134 rooms (no JSW64 variant allows more than 128 rooms). Unless I wrote some clever patch-vectors to merge the three "Well" rooms into one, and to load another four rooms from memory usually used for sprites (or, as John Elliott suggested, the Final Barrier buffers in Bank 7 (7:#E2FF to 7:#F4FE)). But that, of course, would go against my principle of not modifying the target game-engine.

I might even do a 'faithful' conversion and a 'fixed' one, as JSW II has several design-flaws, such as unfair infinite-death scenarios (when converted to JSW64), and items that can be jumped up for from below - which can now be protected by Crumbly cells at the same coordinates.

I might convert JSW II to every format mentioned above: MM, 48K JSW I, JSW64, and even JSW128 as well. It would be interesting to see what I can do under the different limitations of each game-engine. I don't yet know to what extent (if any) I will be able to automate the conversions.

Converting MM and JSW to JSW II

Now that JSWED (v2.3.0 and higher) supports MM, JSW, JSW128, JSW64 and JSW II, and can export and import rooms from/to any of their room-formats, I plan to write not only MM: JSW II, JSW: JSW II, JSW128: JSW II and JSW64: JSW II, but also a pair of JSW II games:

• JSW II: MM will be a conversion of the original 20 Manic Miner caverns to the JSW II game-engine.
• JSW II: JSW will be a conversion of the original 60 Jet Set Willy rooms to the JSW II game-engine.

I have uploaded a JSW II game containing the Manic Miner caverns - imported via John Elliott's XML file-format, with some manual tweaks to make it item-completable (though not without sacrificing a life) - to the Files section of the Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy Yahoo! Group (you have to join the Group first).

It is a beta-version and an experimental prototype, so please don't upload it to any other websites. I might gamma-release it as part of the Toy box-set - along with the other conversions mentioned on this page.

Comments on JSWED's JSW II import-algorithm with respect to JSW II: MM:

• Cell-graphics start breaking down in "Skylab Landing Bay" [13], where the item-graphic is the Water-pattern from The Off Licence. This particular graphic is also used for Water and Item in "The Bank" [14], and Earth, Fire and Item in "The Sixteenth Cavern" [15]. Subsequent rooms' cell-graphics tend to resort to those of Central Cavern.
• JSWED should import Crumbly cells as Ramp /. It should set the cell-graphic for both Ramp / and Ramp \ to that of Crumbly, so that the user can select either type of ramp (and even mix both types in the same room) during post-editing.
• JSWED does not import sprites correctly to a JSW II game. When importing MM into JSW II, I get only 3 frames of the robot in Central Cavern (#EB81-EBE0) and 5 frames of the penguin from The Cold Room (#EBE1-EC80) - hence the "weird dance" that they do when moving right. Sprites in The Menagerie onwards appear blank in JSWED, and as random pixels when playing.
• JSWED should import Eugenes, Kong-Beasts and Skylabs as vertical guardians.
• JSWED should set each room's exits to the room itself, when importing from a room-node that does not define exits.
• JSWED's JSW II import-algorithm causes only the top pixel-row of a conveyor is animated (this has been fixed manually in the prototype).

I'll probably redo JSW II: MM from scratch when I have a better import-algorithm (either in JSWED, or one that I write myself as a SPECSAISIE function). It only took me an evening to knock up this prototype.

Summary

I plan to release the following conversions as part of the Toy box-set:

1. MM: JSW II (7 volumes)
2. JSW: JSW II (3 volumes)
3. JSW128: JSW II
4. JSW64: JSW II (2 volumes)
5. JSW II: MM
6. JSW II: JSW