Well after far more effort than I originally intended, here is Manic Miner Anthology, a collection of approx 160 new levels for Manic Miner ported from the Spectrum, and a couple of hardware-sprite Willys.
The goal of this project was 3-fold:
Add new levels to the existing Amstrad CPC Manic Miner engine.
Take advantage of hardware sprites when running on Plus/GX4000.
Make fully playable on GX4000/joystick only (Pause - skip levels, Fire2 music on/off).
Manic Miner: Back to the Mine (LiganTM). No copyright info found.
Manic Miner: The Buddha of Suburbia (Broadsoft/1988)
Manic Miner: The Deeper Caverns (Byron Needham)
Manic Miner: The Hobbit (Broadsoft/1988)
Manic Miner: Ma jolie (Broadsoft/1988)
Manic Miner 4: Special Edition (Broadsoft/1988)
Manic Miner 5: Los peligros del LSD (Ignacio Pérez Gil)
Manic Miner 2000 (Aaron Fell)
Manic Miner C.S.S. (Nigel Fishwick)
Manic Miner: The Lost Levels (Byron Needham)
Manic Miner: The Lost Levels DS (Byron Needham)
★INFOS:
This project consists of a conversion to Amstrad CPC of level and sprite data from several 3rd party modifications of the original ZX Spectrum Manic Miner game.
Rather than designing my own levels, I discovered that within the ZX Spectrum community there were many fan-created games which utilised the original Spectrum game engine. I haven't found anything to indicate the authors wouldn't be happy to have their works re-used in another format, but will happily remove them if anyone is unhappy. I've included copyright notices where they exist.
So the goal was to import these Spectrum levels into the Amstrad engine, which I thought would be straightforward. However it rapidly became apparent that the Amstrad and Spectrum versions
were completely separate code-bases, and had nothing in common apart from some sprites. So the level data from the Spectrum must be exported and then converted to Amstrad format.
The spectrum level format is much simpler that that on Amstrad. I used an existing tool, JSWED, to convert the Spectrum game data to XML. I then wrote a c# program to parse this and convert it to a binary file for Amstrad, containing sprite data in Amstrad format, and level data to fit the Amstrad game engine.
Because of the differences in game engines and the colour palettes of the two machines, the results are close but not identical. Some sprites were not imported and the engines behave slightly differently.
For instance, in the Amstrad version there can be only one conveyor per room, and gems can't overlay tiles. Some aspects of the Amstrad engine have been patched, such as in the original you couldn't travel off the left or right of the screen. This now wraps around like the Spectrum version. Also due to space constraints (Amstrad level data is RLE compressed), sometimes a level or two had had to be dropped to make everything fit. Due to the large number of levels available here, I haven't been able to exhaustively play test every one. But please let me know if there are any glaring bugs and I will fix them as best I can.
This version is patched for the later 6128 type ROMs so won't run with the original 464 ROMS. If anyone desperately wants to play it from 464 let me know.
On the loading screen you can select the Willy sprite, which cheats/pokes to enable, and which game to load. By default it will play the standard Manic Miner levels with the new sprite.
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L'Amstrad CPC est une machine 8 bits à base d'un Z80 à 4MHz. Le premier de la gamme fut le CPC 464 en 1984, équipé d'un lecteur de cassettes intégré il se plaçait en concurrent du Commodore C64 beaucoup plus compliqué à utiliser et plus cher. Ce fut un réel succès et sorti cette même années le CPC 664 équipé d'un lecteur de disquettes trois pouces intégré. Sa vie fut de courte durée puisqu'en 1985 il fut remplacé par le CPC 6128 qui était plus compact, plus soigné et surtout qui avait 128Ko de RAM au lieu de 64Ko.
