Origins
My friend Carl Whitwell and I produced the Atari ST version of Jet-Set Willy for Software Projects, circa 1989. The guy we were working for was Tommy Barton, who was one of the directors of Software Projects. We finished writing the game, which was as perfect a reproduction of the original ZX Spectrum sound and graphics as you could get. If you saw it, you would think it was the Spectrum.
At the Software Projects offices, we were also given the opportunity to play the Commodore Amiga version of Jet-Set Willy, which was not yet finished at that time. Tommy took us through to a different room with an Amiga in it, and remarked that Shahid Ahmad was working from home but had left a recent copy of it as a demo. It looked like many Amiga games of the time, full of hardware sprites with smooth movement and lots of colour shades. I particularly remember The Forgotten Abbey, as it revealed the flaw in this approach: each of the monks looked exactly the same. In our version, being an exact replica of the original, each monk is a different colour. Other screens in the Amiga version just had coloured blocks instead of proper sprites, since he hadn't finished them yet.
Our Atari ST version was created in two stages. First of all, we disassembled the original Z80 code and reverse engineered it into C. Then, we re-coded some of Matthew Smith's graphics and sound routines for the Atari ST. We worked using a Sinclair Spectrum with the Zeus Disassembler and the original Jet-Set Willy program, and an Atari ST 520FM with the Sozobon C compiler. We had no physical link between the computers - the disassembled code was listed on the Spectrum screen, and entered into the Atari by hand! Each screen's data was dumped as hex, and dictated to a typist who entered it into struct { } statements in the C program.
By the end of the 1980s, Software Projects felt that Jet-Set Willy had had its day, and decided to cancel both the Amiga and the Atari ST projects. (However, the Amiga version of Manic Miner, also by Shahid Ahmad, had been on sale for a few months by this time). Since Software Projects weren't interested, we gave a copy of our ST version away to someone in England who wanted a copy for himself. Apparently, he gave copies to lots of people. That version can be identified in a number of ways. We altered the authorship message to read "Perfect Conversions, Hamburg", for example.
We once asked Tommy Barton about Matthew Smith, and whether the mythical game Willy Meets the Taxman had ever existed. He replied that Matthew had indeed started work on a sequal to Jet-Set Willy, and had even shown demos to the staff of Software Projects. Tommy recalled seeing sequences in which Willy waltzed with Maria the housekeeper. He said that the graphics were bigger, and not really the same as Jet-Set Willy or Manic Miner. However, he said that Matthew had lost interest in the project very quickly, and had left. He no longer knew of Matthew's whereabouts.
Source: Home for Jet-Set Willy for Atari ST
Conversion - Atari 8-bit
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