HEXdidn't... - A Pixel Art Odyssey

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...

There were already at least a couple of variations on the title screen image in the SAM version of Manic Miner . The first appeared in the original Revelation release of the game, and doesn't look entirely finished. At the top of the screen is a reinterpretation of the view over the ocean from the original Spectrum game, with a curious, charming, childlike quality to it. There are clouds in the sky, an stylised sun with bold 'rays' emanating from it at one side, and the familiar little house on the cliffs at the other. While each set of caverns could be selected by keypress from the title screen, there was no visual indication of the choice made, the player would simply start in “The Central Cavern” , “The Coal Chute” or “In Xanadu, did Kubla Khan?” , based on whether they had pressed a number key before starting... But it also didn't indicate which button to hit to start, presumably because that was noted on the disk inlay. A later version added simple text instruct...

Personally, my biggest gripe with the original version of Manic Miner for the SAM was that most, if not all of the scenery could have been recreated in MODE 2 with barely any alteration or loss of fidelity. Some of the original graphics might even pass for MODE 1 at first glance, since there are 8x8px blocks containing just two colours. Furthermore, since the Willy sprite passes behind the scenery, it wouldn't even have suffered from significant attribute clash in MODE 2. However, to be fair, very few versions of the game really go overboard on the scenery, since it's all just platforms to jump on, walk across and fall through, or walls to impede progress. It could easily be argued that there's no great need for the scenery to look stunning . Most other versions even retain the plain, black background of the Spectrum version and, at the end of the day, a game like Manic Miner isn't about having the whizziest graphics, it's about timing your movement and making ...