MANIC MINER SCREEN EDITOR (C) 1998 BROADSOFT
=========================

For the Sinclair ZX Spectrum +2

Written by Andrew Broad
Email:     broada@cs.man.ac.uk
Website:   http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/

Introduction
------------

The Manic Miner Screen Editor (MMSE) is a program which allows you to redefine the rooms in Matthew Smith's classic Manic Miner, which I acknowledge as being the copyright of Bug-Byte (1983). It is superior to any of the MM editors hitherto released on the Internet, because it allows rooms to be edited in ways that were not possible using those, such as the colour schemes and the paths of the guardians and probably much more besides, as is apparent with all MM rewrites written by people other than me up to this point.

I used MMSE (in its earlier, unreleased incarnations) to create my brilliant MANIC MINER 4, and also MANIC MINER: THE BUDDHA OF SUBURBIA which I'm releasing in parallel with MMSE!

A million thanks go to Richard Hallas (Richard@hallas.demon.co.uk) for rescuing the Spectrum files from audio cassette and converting them to TAP files, as well as for writing the fabulous Join The Jet-Set! and Jet-Set Willy In Space!

MMSE.TAP
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This TAP file contains the Manic Miner Screen Editor itself, which was written in 128 BASIC on a Spectrum +2 as a series of programs which save themselves onto and load each other from the silicon disc.

The main idiosyncrasy of MMSE is that it uses files in a 20K format to store Manic Miner rooms - 20480 bytes, from memory addresses 45056 to 65535. Such a file containing the original Manic Miner caverns have been appended to this TAP file. I have written a little utility called MM Loader to help you convert from and to the standard 32K Manic Miner file format. MM Loader is also included in this zip archive (see the section "MMLOADER.TAP" below).

I have not had time to write a proper user guide for MMSE, but I have written the user interface to be as self-explanatory as possible, so you should get on okay with it once you understand what redefining a Manic Miner room entails. In a nutshell, MMSE operates in a screen layout editor which allows you to place blocks on the screen, with all the other options accessible from a menu system which you get into by pressing `9' from here. You can save your work or switch to editing another room by pressing `0' on the screen layout editor.

I suggest downloading my Manic Miner Room Format from http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/willy/format.html, because in addition to lots of technical details (which you can filter out, because that's what MMSE takes care of for you), it contains lots of useful tips for designing rooms, which I would have included in a user guide if I'd written one!

Known Bugs
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I have spent a lot of time in the last two or three weekends hacking MMSE into a form where it is as user-friendly as possible to people other than myself, and to eliminate all the bugs I could, but it is still possible you may have problems...

Because MMSE is a 128K program, this is likely to cause problems with certain emulators (MacSpectacle 1.8.2 for one) that do not seem to handle this architecture properly, silicon disk operations in particular. When I tried to run MMSE on my emulator, it was not saving the programs to silicon disk properly, and I got reports such as "b Wrong file type", not to mention that MMSE runs very slowly on MacSpectacle! But these are faults of the emulator, not of the program itself, which works fine on a real Spectrum! :-)

An esoteric quirk which I have never been able to get to the bottom of is that sometimes when you're editing an 8x8 graphics sprite, the program breaks with a "2 Variable not found" report, even though when I go through all the variables at the line referred to in the report, they have all been initialised. If this happens, you should be able to recover by issuing a GO TO 40 (if I remember rightly) command.

Another bug that occasionally crops up is that the 16x16 graphic editor breaks with a "C Nonsense in BASIC" report, because MMSE has somehow poked over the program space and taken out a colon or something! It is also possible for MMSE to do this to screen layouts, resulting in an ill-defined blob, but this bug has never caused me a serious problem in practice!

The screen layout editor used to sometimes crash the Spectrum, but this hasn't happened to me for ages, so it may be that my hacking somehow removed this nasty bug, I'm not quite sure how! :-)

MMLOADER.TAP
------------

As mentioned earlier, MMSE insists on using 20K files of Manic Miner rooms, which are fine for editing but not to play, as it needs the program code which resides from 32768 to 45055 to do that!

So I have written a little utility called MM Loader that loads in the 12K that is not stored in MMSE files, followed by a 20K file or a 32K file of your choice. You can then either play the game, or save a 20K or 32K file, which gives you a way of converting from one to the other format (32K to 20K for loading into MMSE, or 20K to 32K to create a stand-alone MM game).

MMSE does not allow you to edit the lower 12K (addresses 32768 to 45055) - that is beyond its scope - but you could edit this part by other means, save that as a 32K file, and load a 20K file that you have edited using MMSE on top of that.

Internet
--------

I have a Spectrum page on the World Wide Web, at http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/.

There's a page dedicated to Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy games at http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/willy/.

Games I have written can be downloaded from http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~broada/spectrum/download/. This page also has news and previews of any future games I'm planning to release, including projected release dates (which may change over time according to my progress).

Whenever I release something, I announce it on the comp.sys.sinclair newsgroup, so Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy fans should regularly look through this newsgroup and/or periodically check my website.

Copyright Notice
----------------

MANIC MINER SCREEN EDITOR is of course my copyright, but I don't mind you putting it on your own website, or using it to create your own games. If you put it on another website, it must state that it is the copyright of Broadsoft - failure to do so may be construed as plagiarism! If you use it to create a game, an acknowledgement would be nice! :-)

Please let me know if you do put MMSE on your website or use it to create a game - it's not that I'd have any objections, I'd just be very interested to know what follows from releasing my editor!
