A work-in-progress port of Matthew Smith's classic 1983 Sinclair ZX Spectrum game to the C++ language and using SDL.
Penguins, Man Eating Toilets, Seals, Mutant Telephones, Bugs,
Falling Skylabs, Kangaroo's, plus many more, join forces
to stop Willy in his quest to get the treasure
This is my very experimental attempt at porting the Manic Miner Z80 assembly to the C++ language, allowing for it to be played on Windows, macOS, and Linux, without the need for a ZX Spectrum emulator.
One of my goals was to retain the pixel perfect nature of the game. To achieve this the original memory reading/writing as done on the ZX Spectrum has been retained. The full memory map is provided as a simple array:
// src/speccy.h
uint8_t memory[TOTAL_MEMORY]; // 64KBAll memory read/write address values of the original assembly (e.g. LD (16384),A)
were retained in the C code without alteration. It does however mean that on each
game frame the screen memory has to be converted to something that SDL can work
with. This comes at a performance cost, however, this should not a problem with
any computer from the last couple of decades.
It's a neat trick that saved a huge amount of time and allowed for a pixel perfect conversion.
The Z80 assembly I used as a starting point was disassembled by Richard Dymond as part of his Skoolkit project (https://github.com/skoolkid/manicminer).
NO EMULATORS were harmed in the making of this game!
- Left, right arrow keys
- Space to jump
- Enter to start
- P to pause
- M to mute sound
- Q to quit
The goal of the project is to re-implement Manic Miner in portable C/C++ code, without changing any of the core game play!
Q. Does it build, does it run?
A. Yes and Yes!
Q. Is it playable?
A. Yes, mostly.
As the game is playable most things work as expected and there are actually not that many bugs. Therefore it's easier to list the things that don't work:
- GFX glitches: baddie sprites can 'pick up' pixels from Willy when you get too close to them.
- No Sound.
- No Joystick support.
- Game Over screen needs some work.
- Performance: it's not the most performant code at the moment.
I've only tested on Linux and macOS.
Miner Willy, while prospecting down Surbiton way, stumbles upon an ancient, long forgotten mine-shaft. On further exploration, he finds evidence of a lost civilisation far superior to our own, which used automatons to dig beep into the Earth's core to supply the essential raw materials for their advanced industry. After centuries of peace and prosperity, the civilisation was torn apart by war, and lapsed into a long dark age, abandoning their industry and machines. Nobody, however, thought to tell the mine robots to stop working, and through countless aeons they had steadily accumulated a hugh stockpile of valuable metals and minerals, and Miner Willy realises that he now has the opportunity to make his fortune by finding the underground store.
Can YOU take the challenge and guide Willy through the underground caverns to the surface and riches.
In order to move to the next chamber, you must collect all the flashing keys in the room while avoiding nasties like POISONOUS PANSIES and SPIDERS and SLIME and worst of all, MANIC MINING ROBOTS. When you have all the keys, you can enter the portal which will now be flashing. The game ends when you have been 'got' or fallen heavily three times.
Manic Miner Copyright (c) 1983 Matthew Smith.
Manic Miner C/C++ port Copyright (c) 2016-2021 Michael R. Cook