About
This is FASTMANI.COM, a build of the Einstein Manic Miner that was never sold. It was found as a deleted file on the master of the Einstein Manic Miner, next to a deleted Jet Set Willy and a FAST build of that too, and rebuilt byte for byte from the flux. The story is in What the Manic Miner Master Disc Left Behind.
It differs from the shipped game in six bytes. Four switch off the delay loop that holds the game back to the pace of the Spectrum original: a counter of 1,616 is set to zero and the loop’s exit test changed so it falls straight through, so the game runs as fast as the Einstein will draw it. The other two change the size of the code book the copy protection expects, from 850 squares to 1,700, which is the size Jet Set Willy uses. Everything else is the shipped game, and nothing in the file has been altered by us.
What the build was for is not recorded anywhere we can find. Our reading is that it is a programmer’s test build, the conversion run flat out with its speed governor removed, but that is an inference from the bytes. We searched the Tatung Einstein archives and the Jet Set Willy community sites for it and found no trace, so as far as we can tell this is the first time it has been available anywhere.
Running It
The disc image boots straight into the game. Press ENTER when asked, and the game asks for a code from “your code book”: a square named by page, row and column, four colours typed as digits, blue 1, red 2, green 3, yellow 4, then ENTER. Because this build expects a 1,700-square book, the Manic Miner code sheet printed on the inlay does not cover it. FASTMANI-codebook.txt in the package is regenerated from the game: the code it expects is a checksum of its own data, so every square can be worked out from the file. The game accepts them; it was checked in MAME. Then answer the joystick question and press SPACE.
Files in the Package
| File | What it is |
|---|---|
FASTMANI.dsk | a disc that boots into the game, no DOS needed |
FASTMANI.mfi | the same as a MAME flux image, which MAME can save to |
FASTMANI.COM | the program, 27,648 bytes, for a disc of your own |
FASTMANI-codebook.txt | the regenerated code book, 10 pages, rows A to Q, columns 0 to 9 |
About this File
Recovered in September 2026 from a Greaseweazle flux dump of an original Manic Miner disc, on which it survives as a deleted directory entry whose data was never overwritten. The disc is built with the Einstein Disc Tools.
Screenshots