LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Manic Miner
built 177 days ago
Friday 19 April 2002 Released back in 1993, Manic Miner was the original platform game. You had to negotiate various maps, dodging killer toilets, psychotic penguins and collapsing floors while collecting various buttons to activate the exit. But until now, the only way you may play was either jump staring your aging Sinclair Spectrum or using an emulator for the PC. And let's be honest, 20-year-old graphics don't age to well. However, the new incarnation for the GBA has had a serious cosmetic overhaul – goodbye blocky graphics, 16 colours and sound effects on a par with a drowning mobile phone. Hello revamped graphics, all new sounds and an extra 10 levels.
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Manic Miner is a classic platform game originally written for the ZX Spectrum by Matthew Smith and released by Bug-Byte in 1983 (later re-released by Software Projects). It is the first game in the Miner Willy series. The game is notable for being among the most important pioneers in platform game genre.
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Room 4 ("Eugene's Lair" in the original Manic Miner) holds the Eugene graphic which appears on that screen. This is a special `vertical guardian' whose path and colour-attribute (white ink on whatever paper you define for the room's Background) are hardwired into the game-engine. It goes up and down the middle of the screen (columns 15 and 16, rows 0 to 12), and when all the items have been collected, starts flashing and immediately goes down to stop at rows 11 and 12. If you do not want the Eugene in your Room 4, one solution is to zeroise Offsets 736 to 767 to blank out the special graphic, which will leave a harmless shadow on the screen.
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The aim of Manic Miner is to guide Miner Willy through each screen - collecing all keys and then reaching the exit without being caught by the guardians. Use the arrow keys to move, and SPACE, SHIFT, or 'Z' to jump. 'P' to pause. Full instructions are at the bottom of the page. For the full list of high scores, click here.
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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.
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Vertical guardians have unorthodox semantics in Room 13 ("Skylab Landing Bay" in the original Manic Miner). Instead of going up and down, they come down from the top of the screen and explode at the bottom of their path! The way this is implemented is that after a vertical guardian has exploded, it starts again at the top of the screen, shifted horizontally 8 characters to the right (under modulo-32 to give screen wraparound). Thus, in the original version, there are three vertical guardians in this screen, giving the illusion of twelve!
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Manic Miner