The online walkthroughs (that are all the same) give 2175 out of 2400. I have discovered two more points-scoring commands. They are:
Pray (40 points) and sit in deckchair (40 points, only do this after dealing with the dragon).
That gives me a total of 2255 out of 2400, which is still 145 short of 100%. I haven’t been able to find any more ways of scoring points, though I did discover one other thing that may be useful:
You can use the coloured buttons, all except the purple one anyway, to turn items back to the original items, meaning you can swap the oil-can back for the carnation, the spoon back for the red flag, the axe back for the (deflated if it was already popped) beachball and the gold key back for the cucumber. You can also swap the credit card back for the blueberry but only if you still have it, which you won’t if you’re at the endgame - but maybe there’s a use for the blueberry that doesn’t use it up that can be done beforehand? And you can eat certain items such as the carnation, the mouldy cheese, the cucumber, probably the blueberry.
I don’t know if any of that helps, but it would be really nice to be able to 100% this game. I’m playing the original version via DOSBOS-X as the ADRIFT version may not have every possible method for obtaining points programmed into it. Thanks if anyone can help!
EDIT:
You never have to use the slide in the zoo canteen. It seems to be just a way to skip going past the thief. As far as I can see, the slide always breaks the third time you try to use it, or the first time after the rockfall (to make sure you activate the transmat device straight away and have to have the correct items to do so when the rockfall occurs). And I still have no idea what’s going on with the metallic sphere, or if there’s anything I can do with it. I found out the pterodactyl near the end knocks the aqualung back down the stairs, but that’s probably just to make sure the gramophone is always fatal without the ear-muffs.
When you swim across the underground river, it says there’s a high-up ledge and you can smell fish. But there’s no way up there. Is this a red herring? Other than that, I have no more ideas.
I don’t really know if I like this idea but has anyone tried decompiling the DOS code? I wouldn’t know where to start. And I’ve found no use at all for the book, the parchment and the travel brochure. Reading them doesn’t help. Nor the postman’s sack, which can’t even be opened and has no hole (?). There are also various murals on some of the walls, which don’t seem to help either.
I’d never actually heard of Jacaranda Jim until I saw your post. However, your post has intrigued me enough to do a bit of digging and it’s now on my ever growing list of games to play.
The original author of the game, Graham Cluley, has a website that contains a “step-by-step complete solution” - see https://grahamcluley.com/misc/jacaranda-jim/. I’d assume that this is the definitive solution if you haven’t already seen it.
However, if it still doesn’t provide a 100% solve then you may need to do some decompilation to break out the locations/objects, dictionary and text strings. This is probably not going to be particularly easy as I understand that Graham wrote the engine from scratch in Pascal. So, not easy but not impossible if you are desperate enough…
Maybe you could forum-ping the gentlemen running the podcast to see if any of them could help? I can’t remember off the top of my head whether any of them completed it.
Cool. I’ve started trying to examine literally everything I can think of in each room description, and I found something else that’s probably nothing but you never know:
At the bottom of the staircase near the end, where the safe is, the first time you enter the room it says you tripped over a tripwire that made bells ring or something. No idea if this does anything or is just extra flavour text since the Security Guard is there. It also says the east tunnel is blocked by rocks. If you examine the rocks, it says you don’t know if you can move them, but you can smell fish behind them. Very similar to the high-up ledge where you can smell fish, just west and across the lake from there. And I found this before but didn’t mention it as I didn’t think it was important, but again, you never know: if you type x wall inside the church, it tells you it was signed by Saryl Dwinden, which is the same name on one or two of the murals. It says “artist of White-Lorter fame” in the reading room, so as the name is a spoonerism apparently, that could be too, making it “Light Water” or something. I also wonder if there’s more to the pirate because his computer has the coordinates for Kastria displayed on its screen: 1001100 / 010 which are written out in words in the travel brochure. The description of the oil-can has the name Pimpot Brache, and the description of the money states that Fango Watussi (who also wrote the book outside the greengrocer’s) is the Emperor of Ibberspleen IV. The milk bottle says Pob’s Dairy on it. No idea if any of this means anything.
And I don’t know Graham Cluley (and his website kinda discourages people from asking him questions about his old games), so I’d feel bad bothering him about this. But if someone else draws his attention to this thread, that would be appreciated of course! It might also be worth mentioning that although HUMBUG has a map on Graham’s website, Jacaranda Jim does not, even though a map was given out as a registration bonus. So maybe there might have been a hint or two on the map he sent out? Just a thought.
Thanks, everyone!
EDIT: about the names earlier:
If you ask Alan about Brache or pain, he will mention the name Alex Bull as being a pain. If you ask him about Alex Bull, he has a unique response as do several other characters when asked about Alex Bull. I wonder if there’s any relevance to this. And if you try chopping the tree outside the Tailor’s, you find it’s made of metal. You can’t seem to climb it. Is it at all relevant for anything?
It might be worth hitting up Campbell Wild. Campbell is creator of ADRIFT and he ported both Jacaranda Jim and Humbug to the ADRIFT format (with Cluley’s blessing). If anyone knows his way around those games, it’s him.
Unfortunately there are a number of mistakes in the ADRIFT port of Jacaranda Jim, and its maximum score seems to be 2255, not 2400. But I’ve looked at it a bit.
P.S. You must remember that I wrote these games a very long time ago, and I don’t really remember the solutions. So it’s not usually worthwhile emailing me asking questions about them! Fortunately other people on the net have worked out the full solutions if you’re desperate.
And the “full” solution he links to is the same (incomplete) one that’s everywhere else.
I did end up emailing Graham, so don’t pester hm - I’ll update if I hear back. I also linked to this thread.
EDIT:
I don’t know if this is a glitch or not but the Troll doesn’t reset if you start a new game after getting past him. You have to quit right out and restart the game file fully (or maybe restore a saved game with him not passed but I don’t know if that works without checking). A lot of characters seem to have things to say about the Troll too.
EDIT 2:
Has anyone found any use for the buttons other than this:
Red: Red flag <> Spoon (Town hall)
Pink: Carnation <> Oil-can (Church)
Green: Cucumber <> Gold key (Zoo canteen)
Blue: Blueberry <> Credit card (Library)
Yellow: Beachball <> Axe (Greengrocers’ toilet)
Purple: Deckchair → Green dragon, then Purple dragon → Deckchair and ear-muffs (Zoo canteen, one time each)
The purple one is in the post office, and the others are all in the secret room accessed by waving the wand in the Invoices cell in front of Alan. They are all electrified, requiring the gloves to use them. There doesn’t appear to be anything you can do with the green button when the dragon is green - as both green and purple are for the zoo canteen which is where the dragon appears. And there’s nothing you can do with the deckchair and ear-muffs afterwards as far as I can tell - the purple button seems to not work on anything else afterwards - but then you do need the ear-muffs to get past the gramophone every time near the end as there seems to be no way to get rid of the hazard permanently.
Any other ideas, please let me know. Any uses for the carnation, cucumber, blueberry before getting the aqualung, beachball before or after popping it and before or after chopping the axe door, or the deckchair other than just sitting on it for 40 points once the dragon’s gone. You can reach the endgame with all those items (but the beachball will remain popped even if you swap it to the axe and back again. I haven’t found a use for the pirate’s computer or the book, parchment, travel brochure or postman’s sack. I also wonder if the telegram and skates might have another use before giving them to Ernie, but probably not.
There are so many things you can ask characters. The Thief has different things to say if you see him when he’s robbing you on the beach vs. when you’re on his rock. I couldn’t get much sense out of the Pirate, Grog, Troll or Tailor by asking them stuff - most of the time they either use one of their generic replies or something equally useless. And it seems you can give plenty of stuff to the Pirate and Yitshak but I don’t know if it does any good. Giving stuff to Yitshak seems bad as he seems to remove them from the game, whereas at least you can get stuff back from the others. The Thief’s rock’s anemone will knock stuff on to the beach if you drop things there, and you can screw up by planting the seed on the rock - it lets you and it puts the ticket there without the Thief taking it and going away. You can plant the seed almost anywhere outdoors and some places in the cave too, so I wonder if there’s an optimal location? There’s even a double-decker bus inside the glacier near the start that you can see from below it if you examine the glacier. Lots to experiment with!
And then he was all jazzed on Bsky after we posted the episode. So. Sometimes it’s just a matter of motivation.
Also fielding “HALLO HOW DO I PLAY GAEM???” inquiries is different than “hey so for real was your game actually point-complete, because check this out–”
I don’t know how much help the ADRIFT port will be. It appears to be a port made without recourse to the source code - made by playing the original and trying to program in all the correct parser responses etc. The top score in the port is 2255, which leads me to believe the author couldn’t find everything either, and I’m afraid there are numerous bugs and mistakes in the port. It is a relatively good port but seasoned players will come across several mistakes and differences.
EDIT: I’ve discovered a potential crash when you reach the security guard. Sometimes any say command will cause the game to hang. More below:
It looks like sometimes the variable for the postman’s name doesn’t initialise properly or something, causing the game to crash when it tries to read it. This can only happen before you kill the postman, as once you do kill him, it sets his name correctly as shown on his papers. I haven’t yet narrowed down the exact conditions but it could be just the say command in the security guard’s room if you haven’t killed the postman in the current session and restarted, or if you restored a game saved during a session where the postman hadn’t been killed or something. I’ll see if I can work it out properly, but as things are, it can only happen before you get the correct name so it’s not a game-breaking crash.
EDIT 2: I thought of another possibility. Maybe if you kill the postman then restart during the same session (whether you die or not), the game might try to reinitialise the postman’s name variable and get it wrong, causing the crash. So it could be either possibility or something else. I’ll experiment some more. It looks like saving and restoring saves the state of the variable exactly as it is in the save file and restores it the same way, so I’ll have to start a new set of saves for each test.
EDIT 3: It’s not restarting after killing him. If you do that, it reinitialises the variable correctly. Next I’ll test a complete fresh start. If that’s not it, something else caused the glitch somehow. But in the glitched file, it does fix itself when you kill the postman and it picks out a name for him, so the file is still completable. The only other thing I may have done differently is wait until the postman is in the cave before pulling the lever. If you do that, he gets out of the cave somehow (I’d have to count moves to see whether he’s warped out instantly or whether he just acts as if the rockfall isn’t there when going north or something). I don’t suppose that made any difference but it’s something else I can test at least.
I discovered that he changes part of his route upon the rockfall happening. His route lasts 31 turns exactly both before and after the rockfall. At the very start of the game he is outside the post office, about to go north (I worked this out by counting turns and counting backwards from where you see him when you get to town, then confirming it by being outside the post office on turn 31). His route goes north to the beach, west, east, east, south, south, north, north, west, south, south (now outside the greengrocer’s) then anticlockwise around the outside of the town, going in and out of most buildings but not the zoo or the greengrocer’s. Then he goes back into the post office after passing the greengrocer’s again going north, into the post office, waits one turn filling his bag, then out again for a total of 31 turns. The difference after the rockfall is that now the south, south, north, north are removed from the beach and cave part of the route, and instead he goes in, in, out, out at the greengrocer’s on the way back from the beach (not when he goes north past the greengrocer’s at the end of his route). So the rest of the route is identical with the start and end being the same (at the post office), and if he’s anywhere between outside the greengrocer’s about to go west and the beach by the thief’s rocks having just come from the middle of the beach, he won’t move upon the rockfall, but if he’s in the cave or the beach going back, or outside the post office going south, he’ll be warped four places forwards on his route when the rockfall occurs. The route no longer has the south, south, north, north at the cave part but it now has in, in, out, out at the greengrocer’s having come from the north, so if he’s outside the greengrocer’s about to go west, he will still go west, but if he’s outside the post office about to go south, he’ll be warped to inside the greengrocer’s about to go out, making the rest of the route line up the same. (I know this is far more technical than it needed to be as an explanation but it shows that the postman’s position is likely calculated based on a turn counter, causing him to warp when the route changes due to the rockfall. And I tested whether making the rockfall happen with him in the cave caused that glitch and it doesn’t. So it was either a freak occurrence or the game failed to initialise the variable correctly at first. What I do know is that the set of saves I have that lead to the crash also have the troll asking for the name, so I think it could be the result of getting to the security guard on your very first run after starting up the game (or loading a save that was made during a first run). I’ll do more testing later.
I’ve tried asking all sorts of characters all sorts of different things and I’ve tried a lot of different commands, but I haven’t come any closer to working out how to get any more points yet. There is one strange parser interaction that’s not worth any points but that makes me wonder, regarding Yitshak and Lewis:
If you ask Yitshak sex, he says “You asking?” and the parser responds to yes and no differently. The same happens if you offer Lewis medicine, although the responses don’t make sense in this case as he asks “Have you got any?”. Normally yes or no results in “That was a rhetorical question”. But immediately after one of those two interactions yes gives “Smart alec” and no gives “Glad to hear it”. I think these responses were only really intended for the Yitshak thing and were mistakenly added to the Lewis interaction as well.
EDIT: Found a third interaction where this applies: ask thief mallet. “Do you want to see it ?” he says, and the same responses are given to yes and no. And I just found yet another: ask alan roses. “Pretty aren’t they?” - and the same responses to yes and no, which again don’t make any sense in this context.
EDIT again: Found yet another interaction like this. Type sleep and it says “Zzzzz.. Bored are you?” with the same yes/no responses as before.
I’ve been poking around. SynTax has reviewed Jacaranda Jim three times in issues 26, 36 and 44. All the reviews were favourable. It has also been reviewed at SPAG, where the main criticism was that the puzzles were too hard.
SynTax published hints in issues 16 and 26 and a full solution in issue 28. Graham Cluely placed this solution on his web site and it was copied from there by someone that uploaded it to CASA with some extra comments taken from the web site. The original solution was also uploaded to the Cheet Sheets BBS, and from there it was uploaded to the IF Archive. So, the five solutions that I found all emanated from SynTax, which explains why they’re all the same. This solution does not give a run down of the scoring, as you know.
I also took a look at the reviews, hints and solution for Humbug by the same author. The hints and solution for that one mention some pretty obscure things to gain points, so I have no doubt that Jacaranda Jim is the same.
I’ve attached the hints from SynTax, issue 16. You never know, but there might be something in there that you haven’t tried.
Those hints also appear in Red Herring, issue 14, p. 62. They’re more nicely laid out, but the last few hints are missing. We can see that the hints were written by Sue Medley, who was also the editor of SynTax. She used to get around in those days.
I’ve got it running in DOSBOX now, I’ll poke around with the hints and the existing walkthrough.
Ideally, it’d be nice to find the missing points, if they exist, but I also think it would be nice to have a walkthrough with better formatting, a points list, etc.
I’ll have to see what I can do. Also I’m trying to get the ingame hints working so I can check what those are.
Yeah, the ingame hints do work if you extract the files from Graham’s website into the same folder as the game. There are a couple of hints that are either wrong or in the wrong place, but most of them are right (with a formatting mistake in the library that causes a hint for the room to the south to be displayed by mistake when you press V).
I’m beginning to think there must be more to the floating metallic sphere you encounter. It’s mentioned in some of the adverts for the game that appeared in those old magazines, and it seems very strange for it to be included but to mean nothing, considering it’s quite a long passage of text where it’s described.
Thanks!
EDIT: I don’t know if this means anything at all, but you can:
hit the cow to make it go to the church (from wherever it is, even if it can’t get there directly). Hit it again at the church and it will roll its eyes and move to the middle of the market. Some players weren’t aware that you can just ring the cow bell again to make it stop following you, so you don’t have to go into the boxing ring for that purpose.
I have something!
I opened JIM.000 in a hex editor and found a section with all capital letters and a few @s somewhere down the file, and spaces marked with 1F. Realising that space is 0x20, I thought maybe if each byte is incremented by 1, and it turned out to be the capital letters from the message you get when you get the ticket but backwards. So if I can find a tool to increment every byte in the file by 1 and reverse the file, I might get somewhere. I should also try the same with the EXE in case there’s text stored the same way in there. But I haven’t found a suitable tool yet. And the text is slightly compressed, with special characters as stand-ins for two or more characters - e.g. ú stands in for en.
Update: Found a python script to reverse the file, and did some search and replace for all letters and a few symbols, using FF as a stand-in so I didn’t duplicate characters as there was no FF byte in the file. I am making great progress decompressing the text and I don’t have much further to go with it now. I’ll update more when I’m done, but basically all the byte increasing is done now and it’s just swapping out symbols for the letters they replace, and it looks like what’s now & (it might have been % before) simply means to capitalise the next letter. And # followed by another character is a stand-in for something else, usually something longer like Gribbley or Ibberspleen IV. Close to being done now.
