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Description
Of the four proposed Cavern 20 'Toppers', this is the one that gave me the most trouble. The original Manic Miner is supposedly set belowground in Surbiton, yet the image at the top of the screen in its Cavern 20 shows a clifftop view over the ocean. This carried over into the SAM Coupé version, although the image was much better.

At first, all I did was adapt the image from Andy Noble's version of Manic Miner, which was ported to the Nintendo DS - another one that featured a sea view - but very quickly grew to dislike it... Not just because it didn't make any sense having a sea view from Surbiton, but because downgrading someone else's work was such a low-effort approach, and it would have been reasonably obvious that was all I'd done.

While I couldn't do much about the size/position of Miner Willy's hut, I decided quite late in the game's production that I needed to create a wholly new image, and set about drawing a city view. At one point, I took a photo from the top of Harrow Hill, toward central London, in the hope of using it for reference. Unfortunately, it wasn't sufficiently clear, so that idea was quickly shelved. In the end, this came together very slowly, over the course of several months, and was worked on primarily in Photoshop, before being ported over to the SAM via the disk management utility SCADM. While geographically inaccurate, I decided to drop in the arch from Wembley Stadium and the BT Tower, both of which having been visible in my Harrow Hill photo.

Due to the palette-cycling requirements of each cavern, this image uses only 12 of the SAM's 16 palette slots.

Description
Of the four proposed Cavern 20 'Toppers', this is the one that gave me the most trouble. The original Manic Miner is supposedly set belowground in Surbiton, yet the image at the top of the screen in its Cavern 20 shows a clifftop view over the ocean. This carried over into the SAM Coupé version, although the image was much better.

At first, all I did was adapt the image from Andy Noble's version of Manic Miner, which was ported to the Nintendo DS - another one that featured a sea view - but very quickly grew to dislike it... Not just because it didn't make any sense having a sea view from Surbiton, but because downgrading someone else's work was such a low-effort approach, and it would have been reasonably obvious that was all I'd done.

While I couldn't do much about the size/position of Miner Willy's hut, I decided quite late in the game's production that I needed to create a wholly new image, and set about drawing a city view. At one point, I took a photo from the top of Harrow Hill, toward central London, in the hope of using it for reference. Unfortunately, it wasn't sufficiently clear, so that idea was quickly shelved. In the end, this came together very slowly, over the course of several months, and was worked on primarily in Photoshop, before being ported over to the SAM via the disk management utility SCADM. While geographically inaccurate, I decided to drop in the arch from Wembley Stadium and the BT Tower, both of which having been visible in my Harrow Hill photo.

Due to the palette-cycling requirements of each cavern, this image uses only 12 of the SAM's 16 palette slots.