Answers to a few more questions

During the past few months, several new questions have emerged from various people.

Someone thought that in the first game stage, Mario has red trousers because he takes the colour from the girders he walks on, so there is supposedly this colour clash. It's not true. All parts of Mario are coloured independently of the colours of his surroundings, as can be seen in other game stages, or on ladders and jumps. This also applies to all other moving objects, for example yellow barrels on red girders (that's where the colour clash reduction system started). Mario has red trousers on purpose, and they are red during the entire game no matter what he is standing on, just like in the original arcade version. But I understand that if someone is used to the Spectrum colour clash, they see it on Spectrum even where it isn't.

I have read elsewhere that Mario must be exactly in the middle of the width of a ladder, otherwise he can't start climbing it. It's not true either. Mario doesn't have to be positioned exactly, there is a tolerance for a short distance to the left and right. Plus, there is another way that wasn't even in the original arcade version. If the player holds the up or down key while walking left or right, Mario will automatically start climbing the ladder when he reaches it.

Also, someone wrote that the graphics in my version of the game are copied from the MAME emulator. It wouldn't be possible, just look at the graphic capabilities of ZX Spectrum and the design of older versions of Donkey Kong for this computer (including the official version licensed by Nintendo). Of course, the graphic parts are drawn according to the original game (by looking at a sprite list image that someone put together), but every shape and colour is changed according to the computer's capabilities, and some are not even pre-drawn, but programmed to be assembled directly during the game depending on a situation.

Several people thought that because the game detects many types of computers and can play sound through the AY chip, these things take up too much memory, and therefore the control options are not available after the game is over on Spectrum 48K. That's not the case. The entire introduction, including the control and sound options, is just in the screen buffer after loading the game, so removing some of it wouldn't save any memory for the game. On Spectrum 128K it is copied to extended memory, so it is available again after the game is over. By the way, the computer type detection is there not only for colouring things in the introduction, but also for drawing sprites in the game to avoid flickering.

And just to be clear, I am not a Donkey Kong expert, nor a long-time player of the game, and if I remember correctly, until shortly before I started working on my version, I had never played the original arcade game, nor any of the other well-known versions. Of course, while working on my version, I had to study the behaviour of the original game to make the gameplay almost the same, but I was only looking for what I needed. The goal wasn't to create an exact copy of the original game, which wouldn't be possible on ZX Spectrum anyway, but a version that I would like and that would be close enough to it as the computer would allow.