Manic Miner

Play as Miner Willy, exploring 20 underground caverns of a lost civilization. Collect treasures before air runs out while avoiding guardians, traps, falls, and quicksand.

The inlay credits the “Einstein translation by Cameron Else from the original Spectrum game by Matthew Smith”, with “design and artwork origination Roger Tissyman”; the program’s own text reads “Copyright 1985 Software Projects Ltd.” Else had earlier, with Ross Holman, disassembled the Spectrum Jet Set Willy, found the bugs that made it impossible to finish, and won Software Projects’ completion competition with the fixes; the company then hired him to write its MSX ports of Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy. The case inlay carries the original game’s 1983 copyright.

Running It

From the inlay: insert the disk with the computer switched off, switch on, and at the prompt type MANIC and press ENTER; the game loads in about 40 seconds. Press ENTER at the prompt, and the game asks for a code from the Software Protection Code sheet printed on the outside of the inlay (© 1984 Padlock Systems): find the page, row and column it names and type the four colours as digits, blue 1, red 2, green 3, yellow 4, then ENTER. A wrong code gets one second chance. The sheet is included in the ZIP as a full-resolution scan, and shown in the gallery; a regenerated text version of it is in the ZIP too. Keys: SPACE to start, S, F, H or K right, D, G, J or L left, SHIFT keys to jump, P and Q for volume, W to wait, BREAK to abort. A joystick also works.

Files on the Disc

Both sides of the disc carry the same contents, byte for byte.

The second entry has an empty file name and is a copy of MANIC.COM differing in two bytes. The directory also still holds three deleted entries, JETSET.COM, FASTMANI.COM and FASTJETS.COM, whose data was never overwritten: a complete Jet Set Willy and two speed-test builds, left on the publisher’s master. All five files, rebuilt from the flux, are in the ZIP’s recovered folder with regenerated code books for both games; the Jet Set Willy is also offered on its own as Jet Set Willy (Original, with Code Protection). The story is told in What the Manic Miner Master Disc Left Behind. Nothing has been cleaned up in the images.

About this Dump

The ZIP package holds both sides of an original disc, dumped in September 2026 with a Greaseweazle and an original Einstein 3" drive. Each side is provided as a raw flux capture (.scp), a MAME flux image (.mfi) and a decoded disk image (.dsk), and both sides of the inlay are included as scans, the protection code sheet among them, so the package can be played as sold. Every sector on both sides read with a good CRC on the first pass. The copy previously offered here was this build with the protection check patched out.