Geoff's Jet Set Willy Page

Last updated: 10 July 2003

This is a page related to the computer game "Jet Set Willy"; if you don't know what this is, you probably won't make sense of what follows.

JSW originally came out in late 1983 for the ZX Spectrum, and was a development of an earlier Spectrum game called "Manic Miner", itself an adaptation of a game for the Atari called "Miner 2049'er". To a generation of computer users, it's an undeniable classic; while by today's standards it's somewhat primitive and ridiculously simple to play, it still manages to amuse, delight and frustrate years on. Richard Hallas has written a good history of JSW.

A rather unintentional part of the game's appeal is due to the fact that, unlike almost other Speccy games, it lends itself very well to hacking and to redesign, not least because of its relatively simple underlying mechanics. Redesigning the game has become something of an art form; Andrew Broad has many pages of JSW-related resources in which he lists a surprisingly large number of redesigns, including my four efforts below. See also Jet Set Willy remakes; there are some nice comments about me in there :-) :-)

I have rewritten parts of the original game engine to eliminate a few bugs and limitations; the result has become known as the "Geoff Mode" engine. The principal changes are described on a separate page.

I've also written some JSW-related utilities in Perl, which will hopefully be useful to JSW designers. Beta versions of these are downloadable; I'd greatly appreciate feedback. You'll need to install Perl if you don't already have it. The utilities are:

jswclop.pl: a JSW "compiler". It redesigns the game according to text-based descriptions, and will be useful to designers who don't use, or can't find, a proper editor. The format is described in jswclop.txt, which is also provided.
jswdump.pl: displays parts of the game in a format usable by the above.
sprlist.pl: shows which guardians are used where.
z80dump.pl: dumps .Z80 files in hex.
disz80.pl: Perl-based Z80 disassembler for .Z80 files.

You can also download four JSW games which I have designed. The first was designed by myself, my brother Iain, and my friend Alasdair over a period of some years; the rest are all mine. One screen from each is shown below; click on it to download the files relating to the game.


J4, aka "The Fourth Remix"	Willy the Hacker

Willy takes a Trip	ZX Willy the Bug Slayer