Manic Miner Room Format
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Manic Miner Room Formatby Andrew BroadThis document updated 5th January 2000 - changes since previous version (17th November 1999):
IntroductionWelcome to my Manic Miner Room Format! I figured all this out for myself by eyeballing the data and experimenting. That was back in 1992, before I had access to the Internet, therefore I had no idea that other people have also written Manic Miner editors and unofficial sequels! But as far as I know, this is the only technical specification for Manic Miner on the Internet, and none of the existing editors - except my own Manic Miner Screen Editor which has now been released - appear to have all this knowledge built into them! Everything you ever wanted to know about the room format is here, plus I impart lots of tips on creating special effects as well as pointing out the pitfalls to avoid! I did this for Jet Set Willy as well, but Arsen Torbarina has already put a JSW Tech Page on his JSW Ultimate Fan Page, so there goes my novel contribution! ;-( If it's Jet Set Willy you're interested in, I suggest looking there, and also reading this document because many of the tips mentioned here apply to Jet Set Willy too! Serious JSW hackers may also be interested in John Elliott's disassembly of the Jet Set Willy engine and his Jet Set Willy II Room Format. It is very encouraging to see the inventive uses to which the information in this document is being put. I envisaged that people would use it to hack directly into the Manic Miner code or even to write their own editors (Stuart Brady is writing a Manic Miner level editor for Linux), but it is also proving useful for other tasks such as converting Manic Miner to run on other computers (e.g. Garry Lancaster's Manic Miner `88), or mechanical transformations (e.g. Philip Bee is working on laterally inverting (`mirroring') the Manic Miner rooms, and I'm planning to write programs to map between Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy in the future). I assume the reader has a basic grounding in data representation and computer architecture, a good working knowledge of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and some experience of playing Manic Miner. If not, then take a degree in Computer Science at the University of Manchester, get yourself a Spectrum emulator, and download Manic Miner from World Of Spectrum for it! And do check out my fabulous games!! Copyright NoticeCopyright in text of this document rests with the Author (Andrew Broad). I'm a very reasonable person when it comes to my own copyright: I don't mind you putting a copy on your own website (my website won't be here forever in any case :-(), but if you do, please have the decency to let me know if possible (my current email address is broada@cs.man.ac.uk but I might have to do a Matthew-Smith-like disappearance in the future! :-)). If you do publish a copy elsewhere, you may edit the HTML as long as you leave the actual text alone (some introductory text by the host at the top of the document is acceptable, but please leave the rest as it is). You must acknowledge me as the author. You should periodically check the original location of this document (http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/willy/format.html) to see if it has been updated (or reappeared - my website has already gone AWOL once due to personal problems). Known `mirror sites' for this document (please let me know of any others): The Technical StuffManic Miner's rooms are stored in memory addresses 45056 to 65535, so although the complete game is stored from 32768 to 65535, there is no need to edit 32768 to 45055 to redesign the caverns! Appendix E contains the odds and sods that I have discovered about addresses 32768 to 45055 (specifically, I have found out about the graphics for Miner Willy, the in-game tune, the title screen/Room 19 picture, colour attributes for title screen and for the bottom eight rows below the playing area; the title screen scrolly and other pieces of text). Each room r is represented as a 1024-byte contiguous block of memory, starting at address 45056 + 1024*r {0 <= r <= 19}, where Room 0 is the first room ("Central Cavern" in the original Manic Miner) and Room 19 is the last room ("The Final Barrier" in the original Manic Miner). Each byte of room data is offset from the start address of the room by i bytes {0 <= i <= 1023}, so the datum at Offset i in Room r is held at address 45056 + 1024*r + i. ContentsThe rest of this document specifies the data represented at the various offsets within a room:
Offsets 0 to 511: Screen LayoutThe blocks on the screen are represented as a sequence of 16 rows, each of which consists of 32 characters, one byte per character.
Each character is the colour attribute of the block at that position on the screen (see Appendix A for a specification of colour attributes). These colour attributes correspond to the ones defined for the block graphics, and care must be taken that they agree, because an attribute in the screen layout which does not map to any block graphic in this way will be interpreted as an undefined blob on the screen! (such blobs usually behave like regular floor, but don't count on it!). Room 2 of Craig Rothwell's Manic Miner 7 ("The Menagerie") has such undefined blobs in it - that room has /nine/ different colour attributes in its screen layout! Note that it's possible to design a room so that Willy can go off the edge of the screen, though this can never happen in the original Manic Miner caverns. When this happens, he appears on the other side of the screen. Manic Miner 2 uses this trick heavily, but there are bugs associated with it as Manic Miner wasn't really designed to allow this. The manoeuvre is juddery (basically, if Willy goes off the right of the screen, he goes down one character row; if Willy goes of the left of the screen, he goes up one character row), and if it's off the top or bottom of the screen, it corrupts memory so that:
So if you want to let Willy jump off the top of the screen or fall off the bottom, as happens on several occasions in Manic Miner 2 and Manic Miner 4, you should base your game on the Bug-Byte version of Manic Miner. Title Screen Graphics in Room 19Room 19 ("The Final Barrier" in the original Manic Miner) has the title screen picture on the first eight character rows of the screen (the picture showing the sunny lake, the house and the car). The picture overrides the pixel patterns for any blocks which occur at the corresponding positions in Room 19. The picture's colour attributes are stored in the screen layout for Room 19, which means they can be edited by editing the room, which changes the colours both on Room 19 and on the title screen, as I do in all my Manic Miner games. The picture itself (i.e. the pixels but not the colour attributes) is stored separately from the room data (in addresses 40960 to 43007 - see Appendix E). This means that the picture still gets displayed on edited versions of Room 19, independently of the colour attributes defined there. This has implications for the collision detection algorithm for guardians, which is pixel-based (so avoid having guardians in the top half of the screen unless you are sure that their `on' pixels won't touch any of the picture's `on' pixels). It does not affect the behaviour of the blocks as far as Willy is concerned, because that behaviour is attribute-based. Offsets 512 to 543: Room NameA room name is represented in exactly 32 bytes, one byte per character, where Offset 512 is the leftmost character and Offset 543 is the rightmost character. The characters are encoded in the well-known ASCII text format, which I'm sure needs no introduction to serious readers of this document! I would merely recommend that you stick to ASCII characters 32 through 127, using spaces (32) to pad out the name, as codes outwith this range are likely to be interpreted in strange ways! Ignacio Pérez Gil used control characters for the Spanish accents etc. in the room names of Manic Miner 5: Los Peligros del LSD. Offsets 544 to 615: Block GraphicsEach room has eight block graphics (each of which is represented in nine bytes):
The nine bytes for each block graphic are used as follows:
The colour attributes defined here must agree with the ones in the screen layout, as this is how the block at each character position is specified, so when you change an attribute here, remember to replace all occurrences of that attribute in the screen layout! Beware the case where you're changing to an attribute that already occurs on the screen (because you will lose the distinction between the two block types), and the case where you're changing from a multiply defined attribute (because, since there's no distinction on the screen layout, it will replace all blocks of that attribute - it is better to decide whether to replace each occurrence of the block by hand, rather than replacing all blocks automatically and indiscriminately). In general, two block graphics should not have the same colour attribute, because it makes an occurrence of that attribute in the screen layout ambiguous. However, you could try using this technique for special effects such as crumbling conveyors (as in Room 10 of Manic Miner: The Hobbit, "On the Doorstep"). If a block type is not required on a screen, I suggest zeroising the 8x8 pixel pattern and using 255 for the colour attribute as the neatest solution (some rooms in the original Manic Miner use a colour attribute of 0 for this purpose, but I don't like that because it often clashes with the Background attribute). The Block Graphics BugThere is a horrid bug in the Manic Miner game engine which can cause one block graphic in a room to corrupt another (typically so that its 8x8 pixel pattern resembles the first block graphic when it is displayed on the screen). You can often fix it by changing the colour attribute of one or the other graphic if you encounter it. The bug can also be due to pixel patterns, however (e.g. if you laterally invert the pixel pattern for Wall in Room 0 ("Central Cavern") of the original Manic Miner, it corrupts Nasty 1's pixel pattern!) Matthew Wilson has now explained the exact cause of the block graphics bug to me. The Manic Miner game engine looks up each block from the screen layout (Offsets 0 to 511) in the block graphics section (Offsets 544 to 615), and uses the next eight bytes as the pixel pattern to display. However, it interprets the first occurrence of the block byte in Offsets 544 to 615 as the colour attribute, even if it isn't one of Offsets 544, 553, 562, 571, 580, 589, 598 or 607. So the block graphics bug occurs if the colour attribute value happens to occur in the pixel pattern data before its proper occurrence as a colour attribute, and the following eight bytes are used as the pixel pattern (which explains why it resembles one of the pixel patterns for the room but looks as if it has been shifted vertically). There's a similar bug in the Jet Set Willy game engine, though not identical - try writing "West of Kitchen" or "The Wine Cellar" (Rooms 24 and 49 respectively in the original Jet Set Willy) in Manic Miner, and you'll see that Manic Miner will corrupt some block graphics that Jet Set Willy does not! (you'll also notice that you can't jump onto the ledges on the left-hand side of "The Wine Cellar" in Manic Miner, whereas in Jet Set Willy, you can). Note on Collision Detection for GuardiansManic Miner's collision detection algorithm for guardians is pixel-based, which means that you lose a life if a guardian touches Willy, another guardian or the pixels in a block on the screen. That's why the 8x8 pixel pattern for Background tends to be left blank, but it only need be if a guardian would touch any pixels in it which are turned on! Equally, you can safely have a guardian walk through a block of any type, provided it would not touch any pixels. I exploited all these peculiarities in "Dotty" (Room 14 of Manic Miner 4). The first three rooms of Craig Rothwell's Manic Miner 7 are also excellent examples of this. Note that it does not count as a collision if a guardian touches the portal or an item (though if the guardian is white, it'll collect the item for you! (see Room 12 of Manic Miner: The Hobbit, "Not at Home")), and it does not matter what the Kong Beast touches as it falls to its death in Rooms 7 and 11 ("Miner Willy meets the Kong Beast" and "Return of the Alien Kong Beast" in the original Manic Miner)! Crumbling FloorThe 8x8 pixel pattern for Crumbling Floor (Offsets 563 to 570) should respect Manic Miner's algorithm for detecting that the floor has crumbled completely: each time Miner Willy steps on a block of crumbling floor, it shifts the 8x8 pixel pattern of that particular block down one pixel, with the bottom row of pixels falling off the bottom of the character and a blank row of pixels being fed in at the top. If the bottom row of pixels is blank after that shift, it infers that the occurrence has crumbled completely and replaces the colour attribute at that character position with that of the Background graphic. Therefore, you should probably avoid having a blank row of pixels in the middle of the 8x8 pixel pattern for Crumbling Floor, because Manic Miner will infer prematurely that it has crumbled completely, leaving a `ghost' (the pixels in rows above the blank line but the colour attribute of Background; you can see the `ghost' in white ink when Willy touches it) at that character position. See Room 0 of Manic Miner 7 ("The Money -O- Meter") for a very clever exploitation of this feature, and Room 0 of Manic Miner: The Buddha of Suburbia ("The Terminator") for a not so clever example! (originally unintended as I didn't understand it back in 1992, but when I revamped the game for an Internet release in 1998, I liked it so I left it in! :-)) Manic Miner's crumbling algorithm can be exploited to create proper fast-crumbling floors, where there are a number of blank rows of pixels at the top of the 8x8 pixel pattern, depending on how rapidly you want it to fall away. Examples of this are "A Hole in the Ocean" (Room 13 in Manic Miner 4), and several rooms in Manic Miner: The Buddha of Suburbia and Manic Miner: The Hobbit. ConveyorsNote that the specification of the conveyor's direction and position of animation are decoupled from the Conveyor blocks in the screen layout (unlike in Jet Set Willy). What this means basically is that you can have as many conveyors as you like in a room, but they all have to go in the same direction, and at most one `row' of Conveyor blocks can be animated (although all the rooms in the original Manic Miner happen to have at most one conveyor, to which the conveyor animation is applied). But the animation need not be applied to a conveyor - observe the animated floor in "Amoebatrons' Revenge" (Room 17 in the original Manic Miner)! Room 4 in Manic Miner: The Buddha of Suburbia ("Zane Zane Zane - Ouvre le Chien!") illustrates this point very well - any blocks under the conveyor animation have their top row of pixels rotated in the direction of the conveyor and their third row down of pixels rotated in the opposite direction, so this should be taken into account when designing the 8x8 pixel pattern for Conveyor (or whatever the conveyor animation is to be applied to). Switches (Rooms 7 and 11)The Spare graphic (Offsets 607 to 615) is usually used as an alternate Floor, but in Rooms 7 and 11 ("Miner Willy meets the Kong Beast" and "Return of the Alien Kong Beast" in the original Manic Miner), it has a special role:
N.B. The above coordinates are all hardwired into the game engine. You cannot, by simply editing the room data, change the positions of the switches (such that they will still work), the blocks that get turned to background, the Kong Beast or the altered path of the second horizontal guardian. For the switch to work correctly, leave the bottom three rows in the 8x8 pixel pattern for Spare intact, as Manic Miner tries to detect this pattern and laterally invert it when Willy flicks the switch. Note that the switch's colour attribute does not affect this effect. Solar Rays (Room 18)In Room 18 ("Solar Power Generator" in the original Manic Miner), the solar rays can be absorbed by Wall blocks or deflected by guardians. They start from the top of the screen from column 23, and go down until they are deflected or absorbed, so the best way to disable this feature is to have a Wall block at (0,23). Bugs will occur if you let a ray go off the screen without being absorbed. Changing the colour attribute of Background from its original green ink on green paper can result in harmless rays, as in Room 18 of Manic Miner: The Hobbit ("The Last Stage"). Offsets 616 to 622: Miner Willy's Start PositionSome of Offsets 616 to 622 are only meaningful in terms of the way they are used at runtime - when you're actually playing the game, they are copied to the runtime work area and updated there (see Appendix F).
Offsets 623 to 626: Conveyor: Direction and Position of AnimationTechnically, the animation of the conveyor is decoupled from the actual Conveyor blocks (for further discussion of this issue, see the subsection on Conveyors in the Block Graphics section). If you are a lay hacker who just likes to have one conveyor in each room and animate that, then whenever it says "conveyor animation" below, just read "conveyor".
Offset 627: Border ColourOffset 627 represents the colour of the room's border (0=black, 1=blue, 2=red, 3=magenta, 4=green, 5=cyan, 6=yellow, 7=white). Offsets 628 to 654: ItemsEach room can have 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5 items. Perhaps you call them `keys' or `objects', but not all the items actually look like keys (the item graphic is defined separately), and in my world view, everything's an object! :-)
Offsets 655 to 691: Portal
Offsets 692 to 699: Item GraphicThe item's 8x8 graphic (see Appendix B) is held in Offsets 692 to 699. Note that there is no colour attribute associated with this - colour attributes are associated with the individual instances of the item (up to five of which are stored in Offsets 629 to 653). Offsets 700 to 701: AirThe amount of air you have in a room is held in Offsets 700 and 701:
Offsets 702 to 732: Horizontal GuardiansEach room can have 0, 1, 2, 3 or 4 horizontal guardians. All rooms can have these. Unlike in Jet Set Willy, all horizontal guardians in a room have to have the same graphic (guardian graphics are defined separately within the room data). Up to four horizontal guardians can be stored in Offsets 702 to 729 (each represented by seven bytes):
If there are fewer than four horizontal guardians in the room, the sequence is terminated with 255 in the byte after the last horizontal guardian (i.e. 702, 709, 716 or 723), and all bytes after that one up to and including Offset 729 are padded out with 0. So if you delete a guardian, remember to shunt the ones after it down a place, and pad out as necessary! The seven bytes of each horizontal guardian are used as follows:
Offsets 733 to 760: Vertical Guardians (Rooms 8, 10, 12-14 and 16-19 only)Only the following rooms can have vertical guardians:
The alleged vertical guardian in Room 4 ("Eugene's Lair" in the original Manic Miner) is a special case (see the Special Graphics section) - it is not a guardian in the sense of this section! In all other rooms, Offsets 733, 734 and 735 are set at 0 (and so are Offsets 736 to 760, except for Rooms 0, 1, 2 and 4 which have special graphics). Each of the rooms listed above can have 0, 1, 2, 3 or 4 vertical guardians. Unlike in Jet Set Willy, all vertical guardians in a room have to have the same graphic (guardian graphics are defined separately within the room data). Up to four vertical guardians can be stored in Offsets 733 to 760 (each represented by seven bytes):
If there are fewer than four vertical guardians in the room, the sequence is terminated with 255 in the byte after the last horizontal guardian (i.e. 733, 740, 747 or 754), and all bytes after that one up to and including Offset 760 are padded out with 0. So if you delete a guardian, remember to shunt the ones after it down a place, and pad out as necessary! The seven bytes of each vertical guardian are used as follows:
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