Manic Miner (ZX Spectrum) - 1 Loop speedrun in
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 30 ก.ย. 2024
- (EDIT: this run is no longer WR, as DigitalDuck found that you can run the game faster by playing it on Spectrum +2A, compared to the Spectrum 48K setting this run was done on. See his run here: • Manic Miner speedrun -... )
This is probably about as close to a perfect Manic Miner speedrun as I'm going to get. Since my last PB, I found new optimisations for The Menagerie, Skylab Landing Bay and The Bank, all of which successfully came off in this run, and I managed to get the quickest strat for Attack Of The Mutant Telephones this time as well.
In terms of what else one can do to speed this run up, I can literally only think of a few minor timing things in The Bank, The Sixteenth Cavern and The Final Barrier that could be improved, all of which combined would probably only shear 4-5 seconds maximum off the time. So if anyone knows of any other ways in which this run could be optimised, please do drop me some comments below the video.
Verified as a world record here: www.speedrun.c...
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I rank this alongside Usain Bolt's 9.58s 100m world record and Alex Honnold's free solo of El Capitan as a demonstration of what human beings are truly capable of when they put their mind to it.
I've actually got a route that gets this even quicker now (sub-14:30). Only trouble has been getting a good video that showcases this, but I'm gonna keep working on it until I get it.
It's Sept 2024, I'm nearly 54, the world is continuing to go down the toilet and you are indeed doings God's work with my coping.
This was my very first Video Game i played. 1983 or so on my Brand New Sinclair Spectrum 48k. thank you for sharing
Re: your edit, playing it on a +2A doesn’t count though, they didn’t exist when Manic Miner first came out and they stink of Amstrad
Damn those telephones......
Matthew Smith's favourite sprite :)
this is crazy. right now i am stuck in level 7 😄
Ohh, so that white bit by the sun on the title screen is cliff face, not a cat watching the sunrise. It has only taken me 41 years to realise this.
I remember when JSW (2?) came out and getting some graph paper and felt-tip pens and manually re-creating the code sheet.. that was fun! (>.
oh yeah i did that too
I think its time that Speed Runners get mentioned on WIkipedia (for the game they did a record.)
Wow, that's a fast run. Watching this, it has me thinking we should add a Manic Miner speed run to Antstream Arcade if there is enough demand for it.
We have a few Manic Miner challenges on Antstream Arcade already - I'm guessing you could possibly claim no1 on the global leaderboards.
Manic Miner is the game that inspired me to learn to code and make games and will always have a special place in my heart.
Cheers Steve. Can you tell me more about this Antstream Arcade? I don't think I've come across it before.
Great stuff! I watch you on twitch sometimes too :)
brilliant - you sir, are a machine.
the last level can be a little quicker i think. the jump at the bottom left you dont have to jump quite so far onto the platform.
If you're on about that platform for getting onto the conveyor belt then the reason the jump lands so far left is because of the leftmost poison shrub/spider thing underneath the conveyor. You have to be clear of that before you can start the jumps, hence why it seems like it's overshooting.
I *think I remember a slightly quicker way of Central Cavern.... but you had to be absolutely 'bang on' to do it... cos it took me soo damn long to get past Eugine's Lair that I did far more Central Cavern mileage than I wanted. On a Spectrum (at my mum's friends house) and then a 128+2 after convincing my mum that I didn't want a computer to play games.. happy days.. :-)
*Central Cavern.. on the way back down from the last key in the top right, when you drop onto the middle wall.. you can (very tricky) jump >right< between the 2 cactus and if you hold button down you can walk against the direction of the conveyor belt so you get a shorter route back to cage.
Kid's today got it too good... humbug.. :-D
Sadly, this technique only works on the PC and GBA versions of the game, as the conveyor belt dynamics are a bit different on those. In the Spectrum version, conveyor belts won't allow you to move against their direction if you jump onto them from above.
aah.. my memory playing tricks on me... I may very well have done that on an emulator (but I did say *think)... ;-)
Can you imagine kids today playing a game that had to be timed pixel perfect else you go back to the start.. haha
after collecting the lat key on lvl 1, cant you go right instead of going back cross the conveyor and fall through the floor twice to save some time?
@@chad0x I'm not quite sure what you mean?
@@fiskrond9212 I think something like Super Meat Boy is the closest modern game for the platforming, one-touch deaths and precision required, but you get unlimited retries of each level so it's still more forgiving than MM!
This looks set a little fast on the emu, as you can see from my "let's longplay Manic Miner" run of this game I am using a real toastrack model and no lives lost and yet my run is approx 10mins slower, you can clearly see my game is running slower than yours but is being played on real hardware, either your emu is set too fast or there is a big difference when the in-game music is turned off.
Hey, good to hear from you. This run was done on the Fuse emulator on the default speed. If you check speedrun.com's page for Manic Miner, you'll see in the Rules section that this is one of the accepted emulators for running the game in terms of speed accuracy (direct link: www.speedrun.com/manic_miner).
You are right to note that having the music off does cause a significant increase of speed. It actually affects it by approximately 8.6%, so for speedruns having the music off is essentially a no-brainer, as the run times are measured in RTA.
Also, I did have a look at your run and there are numerous places throughout that could be optimised more. I hope you don't mind, but I listed a few examples from the first half of the run:
1) The Menagerie - you do a long pause at the left side of the balcony before traversing it. As you can see from my run, there's no need for this as you can one-cycle the birds the moment you get up there.
2) Abandoned Uranium Workings - you jump up to the highest platform to get the top right key. There is no need to do this, as you'll automatically get it when jumping up to the exit anyway.
3) Eugene's Lair - again, several pauses in this room. If you check mine, you'll notice there's only the one on the conveyor belt (and I do the last two items in the opposite order to account for this).
4) The Vat - waiting for the blue kangaroo to turn right (it's possible to drop down into the crumbling section before the kangaroo reaches the left end of their cycle) and also going back and forth in the crumbling section to get the bottom left key (you can get it quicker by jumping from below).
5) Kong Beast - several small pauses on the left hand side, meaning you have to wait for the pink barrel to get out of the way (if you avoid all pauses in that section, you can just jump straight over it). Also you do the Kong switch, whereas I skip it.
And so on. The point I'm making is that all these little pauses throughout the run do add up, and there are a lot of ways of tightening up the run that could be applied to your walkthrough. So the combination of this and the music would account for why your run comes in at over 20 mins (21:39 is your exact time as far as I can tell, so I would argue that "approx 10 mins slower" is a bit of an exaggeration).
If you're interested in learning about some these optimisations, I did do a full speedrun tutorial for Manic Miner here:
th-cam.com/play/PLqNObzuH834fdcjL-thLDLMeRaV0FGKs_.html
It's slightly out of date, as some faster routes have been found more recently within the Spectrum Speedrunning community, but it should give enough pointers on how to get a run down to sub-15 mins. Hope all this helps clear things up.
@@RuffledBricks That's some write up lol :-)
I was never trying to speedrun this game as it kind of does it It'self meaning the higher score you end up with (minus 2k points for killing Kong twice) the faster you must have completed the game as each level has an air timer,...the quicker you complete the level the more air is left over which means the more score you get at the end,...which brings me to the following point.
If you check my "8-bit challenge #83" video (second game in, I won't paste the link as it may end up in your bin/spam folder), you will see another "no death" run where even if you take the 2000 points off it for killing Kong twice, I still end up with a slightly higher score than yours which mathmatically means I must have completed it quicker than you and yet the video is approx 10mins longer than yours which means there has to be a emu speed issue going on as no'one could make up 6mins of game time over just 20 short levels (my run being 20mins), even my opponant in the next episode #84 beats mine and your score (minus times to kill kong twice) and yet again is far slower than your run as his also has no music (real hardware), It's very head scratchy.
It's not that head scratchy at all, for two reasons:
1) As mentioned in my previous comment, Manic Miner speedruns are measured by RTA (Real Time Attack) as per SRC (speedrun.com) rules. This is because the final score is a flawed mechanism for measuring how fast a run was in the game. Partly due to the Kongs (both of which technically lose you time in RTA, even if for the second Kong it's only one frame from the jump) and partly due to the beam in Solar Power Generator (the speed of the route doesn't necessarily correlate with the number of times you get hit by the beam). And also, partly because if you lose lives in the game you can get more items, thus improving your score.
Also, there are a few other game variables that affect RTA. The music is the biggest one, but also running the game on a 128K Spectrum gives a slight increase in speed compared to 48K. The run I did in this video was on 48K as I didn't know about this at the time, but nowadays when I run this or JSW I do it on 128K mode for the speed increase. For all these reasons (and the lack of an in-game timer), it makes more sense to measure a run in RTA.
2) Regardless of the above, if we go by your logic of "final score = time", it should be noted that killing the Kongs gives you 2500 points each, not 1000 each as you suggest. In your "8-bit challenge" video, you kill both Kongs, whereas in mine I kill neither.
So mathematically this means the following:
My final score: 32302
Your final score: 35584
Your final score with Kong points deducted: 30584
So as per your own logic, your run was slower than mine. Also, your opponent's final score in the following video was 35688 which, once again, is less than mine if you remove the Kong points.
I hope this adequately addresses your concerns.
@@RuffledBricks Ah yes my bad, kong is 2x 2500, I don't know why I thought it was just 1000, but that aside there is definately a speed difference between the 2.
That's why I started a non emu channel, I never trusted emulators, as close as they are to the real thing they are never 100%, I can forgive MAME though as It's the only closest way we can play all those arcade classics.
I still have 2 speedrun WR runs at this time (real hardware only), Bruce Lee on ZX and Barbarian II on the Amiga :-D
@@ZEUSDAZ Hi, so I'm a moderator of a good portion of Spectrum games on SRC, and verified this run for the leaderboards. It's absolutely fair to have concerns over emulation speed, as many emulators do not run at the correct speed, and it's important that running on emulator does not give a speed advantage to running on hardware.
However, we have extensively tested on the order of 25 different Spectrum emulators, running multiple tests - the ZXS4 timing tests, the Z80 hardware tests, other tests comparing processor operations with interrupts and external timers, and checking the speed of various games (including Manic Miner) when idle, and when performing repeatable actions.
Fuse, along with BizHawk, SpecEmu, Spectaculator, Spud, and ZXS4, all pass these tests with flying colours - there is absolutely nothing we can do to distinguish them from real hardware (outside of things like the colour palette, sound, and capture quality - none of which affect the speed of the game). There is definitely no speed difference between Fuse and actual hardware - if there was, we couldn't accept it on the leaderboards.
Obviously there is the possibility that someone is overclocking the emulator, running it faster than normal - but at the same time, there's the possibility that someone has overclocked the CPU on their actual Spectrum, or is running a clone model that runs faster, or is actually running an emulator and claiming it's actual hardware. But we can compare the run against runs performed on a real Spectrum and see that the two are running at equivalent speeds - watching your #84 video side-by-side with this, for example, shows that a good few stages are near-identical, and all other differences seem to be differences in execution. I can't see anything here which suggests the game is not running at the speed it should be.
Both your and your opponent's runs are great runs - with the music off, yours would clock in at ~17 minutes, and the other was a 16:55, both of which are faster than my best (17:17) - and they'd be even faster if time rather than score was the goal. It'd be great to have some more runs for the leaderboard, especially done on real hardware, as most of us can't capture a Spectrum or struggle to get hold of one that still works (my own +2A has both datacorder and line in broken, so I can no longer load tapes on it). Feel free to consider submitting!
I also enjoyed your Bruce Lee run (I've actually been a subscriber for a while!) - I don't know if you're set up for streaming, but there are plans for a big online Spectrum gaming event in the next month or so, and I don't think anyone has planned to show off Bruce Lee there - it'd be great to have you.