The FAQs will appear here.
When questions are posed and answered in the
Discussions
page or the MM/JSW club,
they will be transferred to here.
Why so much fuss about this game?
There are several reasons that resulted in the incredible success of Jet Set Willy. Regarding the poor Spectrum's video abilities, the game had a fantastic appearance. It seemed that the game had more than the available 8 colors (that were furthermore limited to only 2 colors per 8x8 pixel block!). The detail of the graphics was just marvelous! There was a plenty of strange, interesting objects - like the swinging ropes that are highly realistic, hopping rabbits, deadly razor blades, wobbling jellies and endless other inventions.
The player can move freely between the linking rooms and work out the structure of Willy's strange house. In keeping with a good adventure, there are some random elements that have been thrown in. In some rooms the hazards may change places, or disappear altogether. Some rooms may not be entered from a particular direction - you lose all your lives, and sometimes that does not happen. In all respects, the creation of all the rooms is exceptional, each with its own peculiarities. Some of them are very hard to solve. All the rooms and trajectories of the monsters are so ingeniously set, that in most of them you have to observe and plan your moves very carefully to reach all the items you have to collect.
Is there more than one version of JSW Part One?
Although there is only one official version of JSW, there are many hacked ones. There are dozens of various known and unknown Pokes for patching errors and obtaining some other features like immortality, passing through monsters etc. It is impossible to tell on the first sight which version is which.
Generally, there is one version that plays a stunted version of "If I Were a Rich Man", which is the original, and the other one that plays the Manic Miner theme, that is BTW a theme called "In The Halls Of The Mountain Kings" by the Norwegian composer Edvard Hagerup Grieg (1843-1907) and it is in fact "Peer Gynt" Suite No 1, Movement IV.
You can download the program and see how the code looks like before hacking, if you press STOP (Alt Gr + A) when the game is loaded. Then you can change the Pokes in the Basic loader before running the machine code.
Are there versions of the JSW for other computers?
JSW was officially converted to C64 and Amstrad. There also have been many versions made for other popular 8-bit computers, and some 16-bit computers, but they were not published by Software Projects. You can find those other versions on the Download Page.
JGH: JSW and JSW II was also officially ported to the BBC, and more recently, unofficially ported to Acorn RISC OS.
In the C64 version the Attic bug was corrected, and C64 owners laughed at ZX owners for using faulty software, until it was realized that an object in the Forgotten Abbey was unreachable, so the C64 version couldn't be completed either.
Is it possible to compete the game?
No, not without several Pokes! The guys who did it, realized that it couldn't be completed as it stood, so produced the necessary fixes - which then became the official Software Projects Pokes.
What happens when the game is over?
Do you really want to know it and spoil all the fun? Skip this section if you want to find it out by yourself! Otherwise, drag the mouse pointer over the following paragraph.
Well, here you are: After walking into Maria's (and his own) bedroom, you notice that Maria is not there (assuming you have collected all the glasses). You then walk Willy towards the bed. Just as he gets there, the computer takes control of him and walks him double speed all the way to The Bathroom, where he walks into the toilets and sticks his head in it and waggles his legs about in the air. You then have to reload the game if you want to play it again. There is actually a cheat to do this, but I can't remember what it is.
There are 83 objects in the game, but only 79 of them are "standard". There is an invisible one in the First Landing that cannot be reached, OR is placed in The Hall and can be reached (if you have the corrected version)! There is also one auto-collectable in the Swimming pool that gets collected as soon as you enter the room, and there is one on the Beach, that counts as two.
There are exactly 60 "standard" rooms plus 4 more that are not used. Their names are as follows:
0: The Off Licence 1: The Bridge 2: Under the MegaTree 3: At the Foot of the MegaTree 4: The Drive 5: The Security Guard 6: Entrance to Hades 7: Cuckoo's Nest 8: Inside the MegaTrunk 9: On a Branch Over the Drive 10: The Front Door 11: The Hall 12: Tree Top 13: Out on a limb 14: Rescue Esmeralda 15: I'm sure I've seen this before.. 16: We must perform a Quirkafleeg 17: Up on the Battlements 18: On the Roof 19: The Forgotten Abbey 20: Ballroom East 21: Ballroom West 22: To the Kitchens Main Stairway 23: The Kitchen 24: West of Kitchen 25: Cold Store 26: East Wall Base 27: The Chapel 28: First Landing 29: The Nightmare Room 30: The Banyan Tree 31: Swimming Pool |
32: Halfway up the East Wall 33: The Bathroom 34: Top Landing 35: Master Bedroom 36: A bit of tree 37: Orangery 38: Priests' Hole 39: Emergency Generator 40: Dr Jones will never believe this! 41: The Attic 42: Under the Roof 43: Conservatory Roof 44: On top of the house 45: Under the Drive 46: Tree Root 47: [ 48: Nomen Luni 49: The Wine Cellar 50: Watch Tower 51: Tool Shed 52: Back Stairway 53: Back Door 54: West Wing 55: West Bedroom 56: West Wing Roof 57: Above the West Bedroom 58: The Beach 59: The Yacht 60: The Bow 61: [unprintable] 62: [unprintable] 63: [unprintable] |
Click here to download a program for making a room connection list.
Room 47 ("[", above the conservatory[*]) can only be accessed by using the cheat. It is inaccessible when playing the game normally, but you're not missing anything since it is completely empty with a yellow border. Rooms 61-63 are complete garbage.
* Why do people keep propagating the myth that Room 47 is above the conservatory? The original game had no rooms with an exit linking to Room 47, so you can't state that it appears anywhere in the mansion. The original appearence of this statement appears to be the article accompanying the Jet Set Willy Map that appeared in Your Spectrum issue ?? in ?? 1984.
Room 47 was re-coded by hairy hacker Dave Nichols in Your Spectrum 18 (the *April* issue!) as a new room, which was called April Showers. Your Spectrum ran a competition to find this new room (it was above The Beach) and the April fool joke was that we were all playing JSW again, months after it was released. Download it here.
Where are the invisible objects placed?
One invisible object is in The Hall, but to reach it you must use a poke that will place the object to the proper location.
Originally it was placed in the First Landing, where it was impossible to reach. Be sure to check whether your version has that poke, or otherwise you won't be able to complete the game and I'll keep receiving letters that start with: "Help me, I cannot find the invisible object...". That poke was released by Software Projects with some other official bug-fixes.
The other invisible object is in The Pool and gets picked up as soon as you enter the room.
Does ever The Yacht sail away?
There were some rumors about JSW that said if you wait long enough on the Bow, a raft comes and takes you away to a desert island. Were those rumours true? Yes, but only partially! In the JSW Part One absoultely nothing happens, no matter how long you wait, but in the JSW2 (The Final Frontier), the author inspired by those rumors made it possible! To get to the Desert Isle, you must go to the Trip Switch room, turn on the switch, and then make it back to The Bow without loosing a life!
This is, of course, virtually impossible, so another way to get there is to use POKE 30027,80. You'll find yourself in a room called Cheat left of which was the Deserted Isle.
You can also reach the Desert Isle is by using POKE 31224,201 which makes you absolutely invulnerable. Now you can go to the Trip Switch room, turn on the switch, and can come back to the Bow without dying (thanks to the POKE). Collect the object on the Bow and the one in the Yacht, and then follow the saw. When you come to a certain point, the Yacht will sail away!
The JSW competition was won by Ross
Holman and Cameron Else. Ross then became a writer for
the illustrious Your Spectrum, before it became crap. (In a funky skillo sort of way.) I
don't know if they got the chopper ride, or met Matthew Smith, but they *did* get the
champagne.
Ross & Cam hacked JSW, realized that it couldn't be completed as
it stood, so produced the necessary fixes - which then became the official
Software Projects Pokes - and then completed the game, phoned up Software Projects,
told them that Willy went to commune with the Great White Telephone, and that there
were 83 objects.
You die as soon as you enter the room only
if you've visited The Attic. This is the infamous, nay, legendary "Attic
Bug". It came about from some corrupt sprite data, from the centipede, which
corrupted a few other screens.
Software Projects released a statement telling people how to
MERGE the loader and add 4 pokes to cure it, which was reputedly the first (and only?)
time a software house had done so. Software Projects actually admitted this in an
advertising campaign, and claimed that the rooms were filled with poison gas, and it was a
"feature" to make you go back to the Master Bedroom through a harder route.
A Quirkafleeg is the act of lying on the ground, in the
presence of small dead furry animals, kicking your legs about and shouting
"Quirkafleeg!". Don't believe anyone who tells you it's a Swedish rain dance or
a type of pizza or anything, coz their wrong!
It originally came from a comic that Matthew Smith used to
read, called "The Furry Freak Brothers", and for
those of you who want to try and get a hold of the issue in question - it was in issue
number five. And here is the original scanned picture (37KB)
that inspired Matthew!
"Nomen Luni" is a play on words of "Nomen
Ludi" which appeared on the inlay card text for Zzoom (Imagine).
Zzoom was all about shooting planes out of the sky. The joke is that one of the planes
from Zzoom has crashed into the Willy Mansion. On the Nomen Luni screen you see the tail
of the plane and on the screen below (Under the Roof) you can see the front of it (wings,
propellers and cockpit). A rough translation by someone who has done O-level Latin results
in "The Name of the Game".
There were four famous bugs in the program, and Software
Projects announced 4 pokes to fix it. For more details, see section What
happens in the Quirkafleeg room?.
Jet Set Willy is probably The most hacked game ever.
It had a copy
protection system consisting of colours on a piece of paper, which had to be entered
as a number sequence once the game loaded
(called Padlock).
There was a crack consisted of 3 pokes that would
bypass the protection.
A simple way to instantly reach any room is to type in WRITETYPER when standing on the
floor of the Fist Landing. This
allows you to flick between rooms by holding down various combinations of numbers. Use key
9 and combinations of 1 to 5, which actually correspond to the binary code of the room
number. Unfortunately, on the emulators (e.g. Z80) this won't work for all the
combinations, since the emulator cannot scan more than a few keys at the same time...
There are also many other Pokes, like the one for an
infinite number of
lives, walking
through monsters,
removing monsters,
jumping from any height
and many others, that can be found in the
[Cheats & Pokes]
section.
There are several ways of entering pokes, depending on
whether you are running program on an emulator, or on a real Spectrum.
Now load the wanted snapshot and
every time you press "F5" a simple utility appears that allows you to
enter pokes. Just press "T" (tools), then "SPACE"
to enter wanted address and a value. To return to the program, press "Q"
and "R" (return).
Now simply enter all the pokes you want to, just before the RANDOMIZE
USR line, and type RUN to load the rest of the program.
There is a dark cloak of conspiracy built up around Matthew
Smith, the creator of Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner. His photo was never published and he
never showed himself in public as The Guy Who Wrote Jet Set Willy. The people
started to rumour that he didn't actually exist, and that Matthew Smith was merely a
clever code name for a Tandy computer, on which Miner Willy
was born. True or not (most likely not true), the story still
lingers on as an interesting legend.
The general feeling, gained from the previous times that
people have attempted to look for him, is that he does not want to be found. Some
rumors say that he made a lot of money on Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner, and then
unfortunately got into drugs, ending up in a mental institution... The guy who claims that
he saw him at the end of Summer 1995, said that Matthew lives now in a commune in the
Netherlands and works as a motor bike mechanic, trying to put his life back together after
spending some time being treated for "psychological problems". More about this
case, and regular updates on Matthew Smith spotting, on the
Where is
Matthew Smith? page, maintained by
Jet Set Willy Cheats and
Pokes - All the pokes you could ever think of...
What happens in the Quirkafleeg room?
What the hell is a "Quirkafleeg", anyway?!?
Hacking the game, removing protection, immortality...
10 INK 7:PAPER 1:BORDER 1:CLEAR 32767
20 PRINT "JSW is loading"
30 LOAD ""CODE
100 REM POKES after here
110
1000 RANDOMIZE USR 33792
What happened to Matthew Smith?
This page is a part of the JSW Ultimate Fan Page - The most comprehensive one on the Web
JET
SET WILLY
DEC----------
HEX---------
CHEATS AND POKES ADDR
NEW OLD ADDR NEW OLD
======================================================
Infinite lives
35899 000 053 8C3B 00 35
Fall any height 36477
001 050 8E7D 01 32
Super-jump
36404 044 188 8E34 2C BC
Walk through monsters 37982 000 192 945E 00 C0
37994 000 192 946A 00 C0
No monsters
35123 000 041 8933 00 29
Lives minus 1
34785 liv
007 87E1 xx 07
Auto-collect objects 37874 000 061 93F2 00
3D
256 minus number of objects 41983 xxx 173 A3FF xx AD
Start room number 34795 xxx
033 87EB xx 21
"WRITETYPER" mode on 34275 010 000
85E3 0A 00
Bug-fixes:
Fix The Attic bug... 59900 255 069 E9FC FF
45
...or (official fix) 59901 082 005 E9FD 52
05
(use EITHER 59900,255 OR 59901,82)
Fix the Interface 2 bug 36635 239 231 8F1B EF E7
Fix Banyan Tree bug 56876 004 008 DE2C 04
08
Move invisible object from
First Landing to The Hall 42183 011 028 A4C7 0B 1C
Remove killer object from
The Conservatory Roof 60231 000 012 EB47 00 0C
Fix pause mode bug (*) 35591 195 195
8B07 C3
35592 240 240 8B08 F0
(Only necessary if you 35593 255 255 8B09 FF
have either an Interface 1 65520 197 FFF0 C5
or emulation of one.) 65521 033
FFF1 21
65522 000 FFF2 00
65523 154 FFF3 9A
65524 017 FFF4 11
65525 000 FFF5 00
65526 090 FFF6 5A
65527 001 FFF7 01
65528 000 FFF8 00
65529 001 FFF9 01
65530 237 FFFA ED
65531 176 FFFB B0
65532 193 FFFC C1
65533 195 FFFD C3
65534 018 FFFE 12
65535 139 FFFF 8B
* This is a very bad pause mode bugfix, as it pokes code into
a room definition area. If Room 63 is ever used, this pause
bugfix then crashes. There is a three-POKE bugfix that
should be used instead:
35587 090 8B03 5A
35600 014 8B10 0E
35601 254 8B11 FE
Disable software protect. 34480 195 86B0 C3 CD
34481 202 86B1 CA C3
34482 135 86B2 87 86
Unknown pokes (bug-fixes?):
?
56250
000 DBBA 00 40
?
34493
195 86BD C3 CA
Jumping at solid walls drops you through to
another room (not good!) 36545 000 8EC1 00
E6
Flickering between rooms
A simple way to instantly reach any room is to type in WRITETYPER when standing on the
floor of the Fist Landing. This allows you to flick between rooms by holding down various
combinations of numbers. Use key 9 and combinations of 1 to 5, which actually correspond
to the binary code of the room number. Unfortunately, on the emulators (e.g. Z80) this
won't work for all the combinations, since the emulator cannot scan more than a few keys
at the same time...
Last updated: September 12, 2001.