Manic Miner for Windows

Welcome to the Homepage of Manic Miner for Windows

(This game will run on Win95, Win98, WinME, WinNT, Win2000 and Windows XP*)

You are visitor number since December 1999

80'es guarantee: No spyware, ads, viruses, or anything like it (no one thought about these in the 80'es)

Manic Miner was an excelent platform/arcade game for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. To play this game you had to be fast, accurate and sometimes patient. You coldn't just kill them all and move on to the next room. As a kid, I liked this game a lot. It had a good sense of humour - on one level you had to escape running toilets, on another, there's a Donkey Kong spoof. It was ported to many other computers such as the C64 (Commodore 64), Acorn and BBC computers. It was followed by the eagerly anticipated Jet Set Willy and many unofficial (I think) sequels. Today, it's considered a classic (vintage?) platfom/arcade game, and here you can find a Windows version of this game.

What can I say? I like to talk a lot. I have a lot to say, but I know what you really want. You just want to download a copy of Manic Miner for Windows and start playing. Well, it's quite simple. Just follow these steps. You don't have to hear the story of my life.

Click here to download the setup program.

Run the setup program (mmsetup.exe and follow its instructions.

You will be able to uninstall the program later. Don't worry. Plus, the installation is quite simple and doesn't mess up with your registry too much. So don't be afraid to try it...

I've tested this game on Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows 2000, and Windows XP. I didn't test it on too many machines. Please let me know if you have any problem running it. I can't promise anything, but I'll try. You can also check the following resources:

The compatibility page for information about Windows version supported.

The FAQ where your frequently asked questions will be answered.

You don't know how to play the game? Unlikely, but to be on the safe side, take a look at the instructions.

Wanna see some screen captures? Click on the images to enlarge.

Hi, my name is Barak Ori, and if you're reading this paragraph, it means you were not intimidated by the fact that I "like to talk a lot". So here are a few words about this game.

Manic Miner (the original or my version) is no match for Quake, you cannot meet Lara Croft there, and it doesn't have Napalm Strikes, as Worms 2 has. But if you played it, you probably miss it. I think you'd love the old game, with better graphics and sound, but with all the well known features of the original game.

Since I don't have a working Spectrum, I couldn't start the project. I wanted an accurate imitation of the original game, which would require seeing the original while doing the work. When I saw Spectrum emulators on the Internet I knew I found the answer to my problems, and shortly afterwards, I started doing the work.

In 1982 I had a neighbor who I remember 2 things about: First, He used to speak without moving his lower jaw (His upper teeth always touched his lower teeth as he spoke - try that). Second, and more important, he taught me how to program. He had a Sinclair ZX81, and a bit later I bought one too. I still remember how I was amazed to discover Z80 machine language. Who would believe instructions like DJNZ could exist? (Non programmers - Please excuse my momentary lapse of reason). I wrote my first Assembler game on this ZX81, it was a car racing game.

Of course I upgraded to the divine Sinclair ZX Spectrum in 1984. Needless to say, I got hooked on Manic Miner right away. I still remember the race to finish Manic Miner. If I remember right a guy called Yochai Melzer was the first to finish it in the Upper Galilee, which is an area in the northern part of Israel.

Believe it or not, I started working on my remake of Manic Miner on 1992 (which means it took me 7 years!!!) It was right after I had the pleasure of playing it on my PC using the PJPP emulator program.

Since finishing the game I didn't have a lot of time to create other games, but I did write a few things that you can find here.

As a programmer, I often wanted to know how a game was written, what tools were used to create the graphics and how hard was it to do it. In general I want to know some of the technical stuff behind the game. So I though I would give some information about this game here.

The original Spectrum has a 256x192 pixels screen. I've decided to triple that resolution to 768x576, which is a close match to the PC's 800x600 screen size (Your PC screen size might be different, of course).

I wrote the game over a period of about 5 years (!). I started by using Borland C++ 3.0, and finished using Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0. It started as a 16 bit DOS application, and finished as a 32 bit Windows application. It didn't actually take a lot of time to write the game, it just spread on a very long period of time.

The program is written in C++ with a descent use of classes and Object Oriented concepts. When you look back at code you wrote a few years ago it never looks too good...

I mainly used the excellent Deluxe Animation (a DOS version of an Amiga program) for the graphics. Lately I've been using Paint Shop Pro. It's not that convenient for pixel by pixel graphics drawing, but it's good enough for me.

I tried to make this game as accurate as possible. You can read about some of these efforts in my accuracy page.

Many aspects of the game are controlled by a file called levels.ini that's installed along with the program. Since some people have shown interest, I'm publishing an explanation on the structure and contents of this file: INI File Explained - Manic Miner for Windows.

Who need links these days? Want to find something? Use your favorite search engine to look for terms like "Manic Miner Spectrum" or "Chuckie Egg remake" and you will get a lot of great links. Here, try this:

Web www.xmixdrix.com

I don't think I can contribute a lot here, but I would still like to point out a few Manic Miner related sites that I've been looking at. I think you should take a look at them too.

Andy's RetroSpec Page. Andy Noble wrote an excellent PC remake of Manic Miner. It's a DOS version which can run under Windows, and you should definitely take a look at it. I did. Plus, he now has a Jet Set Willy remake...

Matt's Home Page. Is that Matthew Smith's home page? All signs say that it is. You probably don't want to miss this page.

Matthew Smith: International Computer Programmer of Mystery. As Matt was MIA for many years, many pages were built to collect stories and rumors of his whereabouts. This is one of these sites, that also include a resent interview with Matt (Sorry - this link is not currently working).

Andrew Broad's Manic Miner Room Format. I used this page a lot to extract information for my version from snapshots of the original Manic Miner. Even if you don't plan on creating your own Manic Miner or updating levels of it, it's still very interesting to look at.

Manic Miner Walkthrough on Google Video. If you got stuck somewhere in the game, you can always load this video, slide to the right level, and see how it's done. Note that the walkthrough video is of the original Manic Miner game (but the Windows version is so accurate that if you do the same, you'll get the same), and also that the video is quite long - a little over 23 minutes.

Manic Miner Alive In My House. A very funny home made video of a close encouner with Willy. I really liked this small video, and to think it was published in 2006!

WeBook writing tips. If you're an aspiring writer, check out this site.

First, I'd like to thank some people I don't know (and they don't know they helped me):

Matthew Smith (Matt of Earth) who wrote Manic Miner. Do I need to say anything else?

Andrew Broad, for his detailed information which helped me a lot in creating an accurate (at least I hope so) remake of Manic Miner. I started out without his Manic Miner Room Format page, and I can say it really speed things up once I started using his page.

Sir Clive Sinclair. Does anybody knows what he's doing these days? I think I owe him something. Hell, I think the computer industry owes him something.

And now for some people I know:

Moti Gust - who wrote the theme music for the game. Well, you know he didn't write it, but his version of the music is what you hear in the game. The original is from Per Gynt.

Ishai Oron - who helped me with some of the graphic drawings.

Ariel Kroszynksi - who helped me with the code of the graphic routines.

Gili Garibi and Raanan Giladi - who played the game, and pointed out a few important places where my remake wasn't accurate.