Manic Miner (BBC)

About

Manic Miner is a 1983 ZX Spectrum platform game by Matthew Smith, the first in the Miner Willy series and one of the most influential platform games of its era, inspired by 1982's Miner 2049er. This is a disassembly and byte-for-byte reassembly of the 1980s BBC Micro port of Manic Miner (specifically the widely distributed bbcmicro.co.uk release, which adds instructions before load and has its copy protection circumvented, compared to the original cassette release), rebuilt using the ACME assembler.

How it differs from the original

The BBC version this preserves differs substantially from the ZX Spectrum original: only 4 on-screen colours versus the Spectrum's 15, no border-colour control, a much simpler title screen (missing the Spectrum's piano-and-Blue-Danube presentation), lives shown as a number instead of sprites, an air bar on the side rather than below the play area, and two of the final levels replaced with different designs ("The Meteor Storm" and a redesigned "The Final Barrier") that add a new "energy fields" hazard not present in the Spectrum game.

Getting started

The source assembles with the ACME assembler into a byte-for-byte identical copy of the classic BBC Micro release (it does not work on the BBC Master or Electron). A hidden level-select cheat can be triggered by typing "A SECRET" on the pause screen, after which the function keys teleport to different levels and Shift plus a function key jumps to later ones.

History

This is a straight disassembly of the historical BBC Micro port, including its intact but circumvented 1980s copy-protection code (a four-digit code originally read off a printed grid sheet) and a few small deliberate obfuscations, such as a single level-20 byte altered at startup, possibly to complicate creating a perfect copy.

Known issues & limitations

• performance: Game runs slowly compared to the Spectrum original due to inefficient plotting and screen reading methods.
• graphics: Flicker visible when moving the player on screen.
• collision: Only box collision detection available, not pixel-perfect collision.
• audio: Music is basic and a note can be missed when overridden by sound effects.
• compatibility: Does not work on the Master or Electron.

Additional notes

Technical

The BBC port itself is technically inefficient by design - sprites are drawn via slow OS character-write calls and collision uses on-screen character reads rather than a collision map, causing visible flicker and only box-level (not pixel-perfect) collision.

Detail

A few vertical guardians that move at four pixels per frame on the Spectrum version move slower on this BBC port.