HEXdidn't... - A Pixel Art Odyssey

While much of Westen House on the MSX runs in that machine's equivalent of MODE 2 on the SAM Coupé, using MODE 2 in the SAM conversion would result in less colourful sprites and significant attribute clash, because the SAM lacks the MSX's ability to overlay sprites, effectively on a dedicated layer, separate from the background and entirely without clash. It'd look better than an equivalent conversion to the ZX Spectrum, but probably not by much . From left to right, we have Professor Edward Kelvin (the player character), Arthur Holmwood, Dr. John Seward and Lucy Westen: The above appear to be single sprites, but they are actually several different sprites overlaid on each other to give the impression of individual, multi-colour sprites. It's similar to a trick I've seen used on the Commodore 64 (not least in Reckless Rufus ) where high-colour mode is used for the base sprites and the tiles, but then high resolution mode is used as an overlay...

The graphics in the original version of Reckless Rufus were a joint effort by Mike Berry, Roy Fielding and David Green, and a very clever trick was used to get around the low-res appearance of the C64's high-colour mode. Essentially, each sprite is made up of two sprite layers: one sets down the colours according to the 160 x 200 resolution, the other overlays a high resolution monochrome outline, according to the 320 x 200 pixel resolution, to make it appear sharper. The same trick was used in several other C64 games, perhaps the most widely known being the highly stylised conversion of Target; Renegade . Rufus himself is a comparatively large (22 x 21 pixel) green blob with two flat feet, two big, round eyes, a bobbly nose, and a cheeky smirk. I'm not normally a fan of C64 graphics, but there's certainly something engaging about this cheeky stowaway. Weirdly, the animation of his vertical roll has fewer frames of animation than his...

Given that Westen House is essentially a horror game - albeit with a fairly simple,  cartoonish style for its sprites - one thing I definitely wanted to change was palette. The MSX's Mode 2 screen has a fixed palette of 16 colours that is somehow both bright and washed out, offering very little contrast between its shades. It also - like the ZX Spectru m - has two copies of black, even though - unlike MODE 2 on the SAM - it doesn't split the palette into two sets of 8 colours each, accessed by applying either BRIGHT 0 or BRIGHT 1 to PEN and PAPER slots #0 to #7. On the whole, it really doesn't seem like a particularly useful palette. Three shades of green, three shades of red/orange, two shades of blue, yellow and white/grey, cyan and a purply-pink on their own, and then those two instances of black. Bearing in mind the above is the MSX palette according to Multipaint , and not necessarily perfectly representative of what you'd see on actual hardware. I've certain...

The Lower Caverns certainly took longer to develop than I'd expected. We began in July of 2018, exhibited the latest work-in-progress builds at RetCon each subsequent year (bar 2020, where the event was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic), and it felt tantalisingly close to being done for well over a year before we actually finished the playtesting and tweaking. A combination of real-life tribulations, illnesses, injuries and responsibilities artificially extended the development period. Unfortunately for the coder, this had the side effect of giving me perhaps a little too much time to second-guess myself and nit-pick almost everything I had created for the game. There had been a few times during the process where, once a set of new graphics was incorporated into the game, I found fault with the very next build, and supplied amendments immediately. This occasionally led to confusion over which disk image file was the latest, since I neglected to date stamp them for the fir...

Given that some of the highest-profile games on the SAM also appeared on every other contemporary computer format - often both 8- and 16-bit - it should come as no surprise that my early days with the machine were spent hoping for SAM conversions of all manner of popular, big name games. Toward the end of its life, hugely influential games like Prince of Persia and Lemmings were converted, essentially as homebrews, and then published by software companies who were no doubt happy they they hadn't been required to invest in development . In the years since I first joined the SAM Coupé scene, and particularly after joining the Greenford Computer Club, back in 2019, I've been fascinated by other retro computers, such as the Atari 800XL, the Enterprise, and the MSX. The latter I'd had previous experience of via emulating games such as SD Snatcher , Metal Gear , and the Gradius series, but I hadn't realised that it, much like the SAM Coupé, st...

A lot of obvious potential improvements to the SAM version of Manic Miner could be quickly scrubbed from the wish list. Quite early on, I'd been looking at other versions of the game, and enquired of the programmer whether it was feasible to add background images like those on the GameBoy Advance version. Obviously nothing quite that complicated or colourful. For one thing, they're too distracting and make it difficult to see the platforms in some caverns. For another, we only had 12 colours to play with, so the screen would quickly become too busy. I had wondered, perhaps, about a single-colour image – something as close to the background colour as possible – just to give the screen a bit of depth. The lack of memory available for such pictures was another problem, but the main issue was that, even if we had the space for background images, the whole collision detection routine would have to be rewritten to accommodate them. This is because the SAM version handles collision...

As development progressed, some of the caverns originally planned for inclusion were deemed to be impossible to add to the existing framework, or found to be unsatisfactory during playtesting. We'd already compromised on some of the Bob McFarlane levels, reproducing them as best we could, but losing some of their unique features. Some of the caverns which hadn't made it into the official SAM releases of Manic Miner had to be rejected outright (with tentative plans to include them in some form in a later game) because there was no way to achieve their intent within the existing cavern structure code, even with the updates and rewrites. This led to a shortfall in the number of caverns available to add, which led to members of the development team being asked to provide some new layouts. Since there was no set number required by each of us I just let myself go wild and put together as many layouts as I could dream up. I ended up providing four unique caverns for The Lower Cavern...

One of the interesting quirks of the ZX Spectrum version of Manic Miner was that some of its graphics changed between the original version of the game, published under the Bug-Byte brand, and the version published by Software Projects, a company set up by Matthew Smith after leaving Bug-Byte. While, obviously, The Lower Caverns was always intended to have as full a graphical refresh as I could produce, there were events during the development period that directly shaped some aspects of the visuals. Not least of these was that, back in 2019, the decision was made to apply the Entropy brand to the game. Entropy was/is a coding group, founded by a prolific SAM coder. While Entropy might now be most notorious for the much-discussed, never-to-be-seen megademo Statues of Ice , its output included plenty of utilities and code routines, encryption and copy protection for commercial software, as well as music and menus for disk magazines. Once upon a time, I had put together some graphics ...

So, the layouts of the first 20 caverns – the “Revived” set – are identical to those of the ZX Spectrum (and basically every) version of Manic Miner , but with the improved graphics detailed previously. The second and third sets, unique to The Lower Caverns , will be new to most players. The “Remixed” set is based upon levels created by Bob McFarlane for the Wonkypix version of Manic Miner created using AppGameKit version 2. The caverns in this set are mostly quite subtle variations on the originals: additional crumbly blocks here, an extra conveyor there, new hazards (some of which animated, which made adapting them interesting), some with fewer treasures, some with more. I'm pretty sure, in fact, that some of the levels got updated between my first experience of the Windows remix and the version I downloaded to make direct comparisons much later in development. Not least, I don't recall some of the animated hazards and half-size sprites being present in my original playt...