Game over at 1am
The game ends abruptly at 1am (see
35442), even if Willy has collected all the items, or has reached his bed and is already on his way to the toilet, or already has his head down the toilet.
Tunes
The tune played on the title screen is Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. The tune played during gameplay is If I Were a Rich Man from the musical Fiddler on the Roof.
The moving bed
The bed in
Master Bedroom is actually a conveyor moving left to right, but it doesn't appear to move because the first and third bytes of the conveyor tile (shown below) are 85 (01010101), which remains 85 after being rotated left or right twice.
The music of life
When Willy loses a life, the pitch of the notes in the in-game music decreases, and their length increases; see
35668.
Taking a BREAK
The game quits if BREAK - that is, CAPS SHIFT and SPACE - is pressed (see
35505). This works at any time, including when Willy is running to the toilet or already has his head down it.
WRITETYPER
If you take Willy to the floor at the bottom of the staircase in
First Landing and type the word WRITETYPER, a cheat mode is activated that enables Willy to teleport to any room (see
35743).
For example, to teleport to
Master Bedroom, hold down keys '1', '2' and '6', and then press '9' to activate the teleporter. For a list of all the rooms and their teleport codes, see the
Rooms page.
As you were
Willy's animation frame at
34258 and direction flag at
34256 are not initialised before the game starts, so his animation frame and the direction he's facing at the start of a game will be whatever they were when he died in the previous game. (The first time the game starts, Willy's animation frame is 0 and he's facing right.)
White-seeking missile
The routine at
37310, when drawing an arrow, kills Willy if the arrow hits anything with white INK; this means, for example, that Willy would be killed if the arrow hits a white rope. It is no coincidence, then, that in the rooms that have both a rope and an arrow (
We must perform a Quirkafleeg,
On the Roof and
The Beach), the rope is not white.
To see Willy die when the arrow hits the rope in
The Beach:
POKE
64160,15 (set the INK of the room's background tile to white)
POKE
34790,128 (set Willy's initial pixel y-coordinate to 64)
POKE
34800,2: POKE
34801,93 (set Willy's initial attribute buffer location)
Dangerous connections
There are several places in Willy's mansion where it is obvious that he is in danger of falling from a great height and entering an infinite death loop. However, there are also some places where it is far from obvious that merely moving from one room to another will lead to an infinite death loop.
Unused room
There are 61 room definitions occupying pages 192-252, but the definition for room 47 in
page 239 is not used. Room 47 is completely empty and can only be accessed by activating
cheat mode and using the teleport code '123469'.
Unused grid location
The routine at
34499, which is responsible for randomly selecting one of the 180 grid locations on the code sheet by its index (0-179), never selects index 179 (R9); as a result, the code at grid location R9 is never asked for, even though it's present on the code sheet (it's 2423).
To give the code at grid location R9 a chance of being asked for:
Unused items
There are five rooms in which nontrivial item graphics are defined, but not used.
Unused nasties
There are seven rooms in which nontrivial nasty graphics are defined, but not used.
Unused floor
There is one room in which a nontrivial floor graphic is defined, but not used.
Unused ramp
There is one room in which a nontrivial ramp graphic is defined, but not used.
Unused conveyor
There is one room in which a nontrivial conveyor graphic is defined, but not used.
Unused guardian
The guardian whose graphic data lives at
45312 is unused.
However, this guardian made an appearance later on in the room 'Macaroni Ted' in Jet Set Willy II.
Unique guardians
There are seven rooms that contain a unique guardian (that is, a guardian that does not appear in any other room).
Commonest guardian
The commonest guardian is the bird, whose graphic data lives at
48128.
There are 23 instances of this guardian spread over 18 rooms: four in
The Drive, two in each of
The Bridge and
Inside the MegaTrunk, and one in each of
The Hall,
Tree Top,
Out on a limb,
Rescue Esmerelda,
I'm sure I've seen this before..,
We must perform a Quirkafleeg,
Ballroom East,
To the Kitchens Main Stairway,
A bit of tree,
Priests' Hole,
Under the Drive,
Nomen Luni,
Watch Tower,
West Wing and
West Wing Roof.
Commonest item
Every other item is unique to its own room.
Commonest codes
The commonest codes on the code sheet are 2411 (at H7, O7, R7 and C9) and 3443 (at O3, D6, L8 and R8).
Codes from code
The codes for grid locations A0-Q9 are derived not from a deliberately crafted data table but from the unused code remnants at
40448.
Some air left?
The message at
33873 ('AIR') may be unused, but it is still a poignant reminder of Willy's former career as a miner.
Maria's dodgy depth perception
Whether Maria raises her arm at Willy in
Master Bedroom depends on his height above floor level, as opposed to his distance away from her (see the code at
38224); this means that she raises her arm not only as Willy walks up the ramp towards her, but also if he jumps in the air at the entrance to the room.
Rope climbing for beginners
In order to climb down a rope, Willy must move in the same direction as the rope is swinging (left if the rope is swinging right to left, right if the rope is swinging left to right); to climb up a rope, he must move in the opposite direction (see
37756).
The encroaching rope
In the entity buffer at
33024, the definition for a rope uses the second and fourth bytes of the following definition (in addition to the eight bytes of its own slot); this means that to avoid corrupting another entity, the rope must be either the last entity specified in a room, or followed by an arrow (which doesn't use the second and fourth bytes of its slot).
Ropes before arrows
The rope-drawing code at
37540 places Willy on the rope if it is touching anything else (Willy or otherwise) that's already been drawn. This means, for example, that if an arrow is drawn before the rope (by appearing before it in the room's entity specifications), Willy will be immediately transported onto the rope when the arrow hits it.
POKE
64240,60: POKE
64241,84 (entity specification for the arrow)
POKE
64242,1: POKE
64243,14 (entity specification for the rope)
POKE
34790,128 (set Willy's initial pixel y-coordinate to 64)
POKE
34800,2: POKE
34801,93 (set Willy's initial attribute buffer location)
Guardian colours
The most common guardian colour is yellow (25 instances), and the least common colour is blue (2 instances, both BRIGHT, in
The Forgotten Abbey and
The Attic).
As for the other colours, there are 18 red guardians, 20 magenta guardians, 19 green guardians, 18 cyan guardians, and 7 white guardians; there are no black guardians anywhere.
Guardians need a clear path
The guardian-drawing code at
37334 kills Willy if a guardian collides with anything that's already been drawn in the room. This means, for example, that Willy is killed if a guardian hits a nasty, a wall or the floor.
See this happen by placing a wall block in the path of the guardian in
The Bathroom:
Guardian or fixture?
Entity 89, defined at
41672, and appearing in
The Hall and
West Wing, is the only guardian that does not move up, down, left or right.
Unused entity definition
Entity definition 43 at
41304 contains data but is not used.
Which room might this vertical guardian have inhabited at some point while the game was being developed? We'll probably never know.
Untouchable entity definition
Entity definition 127 at
41976 should not be modified or used to define an actual entity, because its first byte (255) is used to terminate the entity buffer at
33024.
One item behind another
There are two items in
The Beach, but they are both at the same location, so it looks as if there is only one.
Slippery slopes
In
The Chapel and
Halfway up the East Wall, the ramps act as conveyors that push Willy down the slope, because the ramp tile has the same attribute byte as the conveyor tile (which is not actually used in either room). There are no conveyor-ramps anywhere else in the game.
To pause or not to pause
If the in-game music has been switched off, the game will pause automatically after a period of inactivity; however, if the in-game music is playing, it will not (see
35644).
Cheats never cycle colours
While the game is paused, the INK and PAPER colours are cycled at regular intervals, unless the
WRITETYPER cheat mode has been activated (see
35553).
Nomen Luni?
The name of the room
Nomen Luni is a pun on 'Nomen Ludi', a Latin translation of 'The Name of the Game', which appeared in adverts for the aeroplane shoot-em-up game
Zzoom by Imagine Software Ltd.
In
Nomen Luni and the room below (
Under the Roof) you can see an aeroplane that has crashed into the roof of Willy's mansion:
We must perform a Quirkafleeg?
The name of the room
We must perform a Quirkafleeg is a reference to issue 5 of the comic book
The Adventures of Fat Freddy's Cat, in which the inhabitants of Pootweet, upon seeing a suitcase full of dead mice, exclaim 'We must perform a Quirkafleeg!' and promptly lie down on their backs and start waving their arms and legs in the air.
Dr Jones will never believe this?
The name of the room
Dr Jones will never believe this may be a reference to the 'Myth of Jones', a story told by the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars in his most famous paper,
Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. In this story, the hero, Jones, seeks to explain how a person can have a sensation of something that doesn't exist; for example, how it can be that people behave just as they would if there were a pink elephant in the room when in fact there is no such thing there. In this particular room, however, there
is a pink (well, magenta) elephant.
The emptiest rooms
Back Door is the only room that has no items, nasties, rope, arrows or guardians.
The Front Door is the only other room that has no rope, arrows or guardians; it also has no nasties, but does contain an item.