A Horseshoe Magnet and a Secret cave?

Ah, well, that's a logical place for the hole to take you. {yolkfolk}:clap:

I was thinking of mentioning this in another topic, but an interesting feature of of the PC Dizzy Remake is how rooms that were inaccessible or mere dead ends were turned into secret rooms. That box you fell into was given an opening on the bottom so Dizzy could jump into it and read the scrolls. (As the smooth scrolling means there's no screen delineation, the scrolls were made into items Dizzy has to stand on for their text to appear.) There was a saw item added to the dungeon of Zaks' castle that is to be used on the bridge to the oil can to make a piece of it float back up and take you to a couple of secret rooms.

One of those rooms, straight up from the bridge, is just an empty screen-sized hole on the map, so I take it there was nothing there in the original game because the remake's room is only there to provide a coin. Then there's another area you can reach by jumping to the right from that new floating platform. I saw this area was pointed out in other topics, a place where you can see a bat and an extra life above you in the oil can room (though in the remake, I noticed the bat from above in the Crazy Labyrinth instead). From the map of the original, it looks as if you were supposed to remove the rocks beside the hard hat somehow and jump across the bridge while it's still in the higher position. Has anyone ever tried using items to break those rocks, like with the pick or the magnet or anything? Actually, if you could jump onto the raised bridge, you could jump up and see if that room is truly empty...

It's empty.
Well,you can grab an extra life,but you also can exit to the left...
Well,wait a second
**Opening and hacking a ROM image**
Ok,here's another GIF for ya:

Haha, nice work! I once did some position hacking on the NES version of Treasure Island Dizzy and got similar results, falling through blank screen after blank screen. One cool secret I found doing that was a screen with just a few random objects on it, including the unused school-of-fish enemy.

So, I guess that area with the bat and egg must have been some kind of beta version bonus that either wasn't finished or wasn't completely removed. I notice from your gif that some blank screens award points, while others don't. What's up with that?

[quote data-userid="348" data-postid="72227"]

One cool secret I found doing that was a screen with just a few random objects on it, including the unused school-of-fish enemy.

[/quote]

You mean this screen?:

That's interesting...Maybe in my freetime I will look for enemy data-maybe there's something more.. {yolkfolk}:delight: I notice from your gif that some blank screens award points, while others don't. What's up with that? Hmm..I never noticed it...
But i guess it have same map loading system like I made for my game.
How i should explain it...There's no one big map,like in Dizzy Age games.
Every map is independent,it's only pointing to the next map that should be loaded...

Hi, everybody.

So the prophecy is true! It is possible to fit through the hole to the left of the skeleton in the haunted forest!

-- attachment is not available --

I have just played "Dizzy Holding", as I was calling it when I was a teenager because I thought that "The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure" was just a description on the start screen. I have played the Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48 KB original version without any cheats. I have used the Spectaculator emulator and I have saved, oh, well, only 274 times.

My goal was to get the highest possible score and I challenge you to beat me. I have reached 91,600 points.

Without any cheats, I have reached the point in the game where you just have to feed the full potion to Zaks. Then, I have gathered all of the remaining things on the right side of the hole in the haunted forest and dropped them on the skeleton. That made that hole to appear. Unfortunately, indeed there is no secret room, but at least it is possible to fall through it. After you fall, the game is blocked. You cannot commit suicide. The scroll with the text is also scrambled.

-- attachment is not available --

As you cannot get out of the hole with the skeleton, just make sure that you no longer need anything from the left side of the game, that is, from the left of the hole. Then, start dropping the things after you have come from the right side of the screen with the hole. This way, after the gap is made, you can kill yourself by falling on the skeleton and you are always revived on the right side of the hole, so you can complete the game. Even though I have died this way a number of times, I still have completed the game with more than six lives, as you can see in this screenshot.

-- attachment is not available --

Whatever I have tried, I have not been able to use the HorseShoe Magnet. It did not do anything in the Crazy Labyrinth. Either by holding it or by placing it near the grates, it did not have any effect. So you can drop it at the end, without having used it.

The only thing that I wished I could also drop is the dry-ice can. Unfortunately, it is not possible to hold it while walking through the lava or the water or whatever that fluid is. Once you drop it near the fluid, it disappears.

I have also tested the breaking of the rocks in the screen on the right of "The Haunted Chimney" with "A Rusty Old Pick". Unfortunately, it does not work. If it did, it would have unveiled another possible route to "The Secret Cave" where that unreachable bat and that unreachable extra life reside.

So, after thirty years since "Dizzy Holding" was created, I challenge you to beat my high score of 91,600 points.

Congratulations. {yolkfolk}:clap:

I am sorry to nitpick, but the game is not called "Dizzy Holding", It's just called "Dizzy" or "Dizzy - The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure". :lol:

The "Holding" text was only there for whenever Dizzy picked up any items in the game.
Although I never understood why the Oliver's made the item text in dark blue - It was almost difficult to read on a normal TV screen.

I have finished the game dozens of times but I never thought of looking at my final score, maybe something I should consider down the line. :yes:

[quote data-userid="3" data-postid="85607"]

I am sorry to nitpick, but the game is not called “Dizzy Holding”, It’s just called “Dizzy” or “Dizzy – The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure“. :lol:

[/quote]

Hi, Adz.M.

Of course, I knew it was never called as "Dizzy Holding". I was just fooling around. I shall remove the so-called "title" from the list, however. Maybe Philip Oliver and Andrew Oliver do not get the taste of the pun.

It is actually the first time that I feel that I am playing the game. I remember twenty-five years ago when I have taped it. Those were the times when they were selling those big black boxes called as "V.C.R."'s ("Video-Cassette Recorders"). I managed to fill one tape with three hours full of "Dizzy I", "II", "III.V" and "IV".

How on Earth was I playing without saving the current state of the game? Of course, I had POKE's with infinite lives and maybe even other cheats. But my main goal was to finish them as fast as possible. I remember that "Dizzy I" took around one hour and a quarter to finish.

Because of the infinite lives, I think that I never used the helping items. Now, to my utter surprise and delight, I have discovered them by chance, so I have been on a real killing spree, attempting to finish out every bird, every spider, every drop, every stalactite and every bat. Have I missed anything? Oh, yes, I have. I have missed two spiders that are unreachable and also one unreachable bat. If anybody knows how to get them, just let me know.

What I have noticed on this forum is that old Johnnies like me refer to the old little machine as the "Sinclair Research Limited ZX Spectrum", while the younger people refer to it as "Speccy", the name of one of its emulators. Maybe they have never had the chance to see the real machine. This is so sad. It must be very confusing to wake up in a world already endowed with Quad-Core Intel Pentium processors, lots of GigaBytes of memory and 64-bit processing. There is no more fun in this complicated world.

Anyway, there are still a few days left to go and we shall be celebrating Dizzy's thirtieth anniversary. Let us celebrate him by giving him our best. I hope that I shall hear that someone is able to beat even the score of 100,000 points.

[quote data-userid="1565" data-postid="85608"]

What I have noticed on this forum is that old Johnnies like me refer to the old little machine as the “Sinclair Research Limited ZX Spectrum“, while the younger people refer to it as “Speccy“, the name of one of its emulators.

[/quote]

I have always called it a Speccy, so I guess I must be a youngster {yolkfolk}:joy:  

And I got my first Speccy in 1983, about a week before Sinclair Research dropped the price of the 48K model from £175 to £125. So the name Speccy was in use commonly in the 80's as a term of endearment for the little machine, long before emulators, so the emulator programmers have obviously borrowed this nickname for their software.

Anyway, that's a bit off the main topic, so to revert to Dizzy (1), congratulations on the score and experimentation!

[quote data-userid="90" data-postid="85609"]

Anyway, that’s a bit off the main topic, so to revert to Dizzy (1), congratulations on the score and experimentation!

[/quote]

Hi, FrogAndHat.

Thank you for your encouragements.

I am happy to see that there are also older people in this community. Can you imagine that these days children are born with Tablet Personal Computers in their hands that are executing the "iOS" operating system? With a "Sinclair ZX Spectrum" emulator for "iOS", they could go on playing "Dizzy" games during their trips down the tube for the rest of all of their lives. But it still does not have that flavor of loading an annoying screeching tape for five minutes.

I still have one more thing to test. Maybe the HorseShoe Magnet could be used in order to enter the secret room that is two rooms to the right of "The Haunted Chimney", somehow, so the prophecy could indeed be true. Killing another bat would even increase the score. Also, jumping above that fallen bridge through that opening in the ceiling could reveal another secret cave. Or nothing.

And the update. I have tested the HorseShoe Magnet in "The Secret Caves" and apparently it does not activate anything there. Also, it does not do anything in the room to the left of "The Secret Caves".

Let us place a bounty. Whoever finds the use of the HorseShoe Magnet and the secret caves gets the title of "Philosophiae Doctor" ("Doctor of Philosophy") in the "Dizzy" Science.

It could just be that the Magnet was never intended for anyway... but does anyone remember if any of the other Dizzy games had unused objects? Nothing comes to mind.

I guess it's possible the Magnets use was never coded in, if that's the case i wonder where it was always intended to be used.


On a side note i only call it a Speccy because that's what i've picked up other people saying, in the 80s i used an Amstrad and C64. Never used a real Spectrum.

[quote data-userid="55" data-postid="85614"]

but does anyone remember if any of the other Dizzy games had unused objects?

On a side note i only call it a Speccy because that’s what i’ve picked up other people saying, in the 80s i used an Amstrad and C64. Never used a real Spectrum.

[/quote]

Hi, Meph.

Of course, there are plenty unused objects in the Dizzy games. One notable example is the hole in the bag that you get in Dizzy III: "Fantasy World Dizzy". Its only use is that once you pick it, all of your items fall through your bag. I think that in the same game there is a bottle of whiskey that you find too tempting to resist and you just drink it, without even getting drunk.

There are other objects in other Dizzy games that are simply not used at all. For instance, in Dizzy II: "Treasure Island Dizzy (Magic Island Dizzy)", there are a few unusable objects. One of them is the "Sinclair Abuser Mag[azine]".

I was curious why do they call it "ZX" and apparently the history goes like this. Now we have to thank the Wikipedia contributors for bearing "the pangs of despised love", as Hamlet was once saying, that is spreading from their administrators.

Apparently, they called it initially ZX80 because of the Zilog 80 Central Processing Unit with an added "mystery" ingredient. Then, they called it ZX81 because that was the year of 1981. Then, instead of upgrading to the ZX82 title, they called it ZX Spectrum because it finally had eight colors multiplied by two levels of brightness. That was the era of the brand new colors, as Amstrad was also called as Colour Personal Computer. Apparently, Atari was called as Sixteen-Thirty-two because of its bus architecture.

Wikipedia states that "The Spectrum is affectionately known as the Speccy by elements of its fan following", whatever that means, as English appears to be a wide range of languages.

In România we were calling it "Home Computer-1985" ("HC-85") and most of us have learned programming on it.

To come back to the topic of the thread, during my tests, I have found out two interesting bug-features in "Dizzy Holding", oh, pardon me, I meant Dizzy I: "The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure". After you feed the full potion to the Rakshas, to the monster, to the evil wizard Zaks, you can still run as fast as you can, "Anywhere Out of the World", as Charles Baudelaire once memorably said. I could not really get out of the Dizzy fantasy world, but I reached "The Hermit's Hut".

Also, although the game is over, after feeding the monster you can still die. Although he completely melts away, if you attempt to go to the right passing through his spot, you are blown to pieces.

I guess that the best way to solve this remaining puzzle is to get one very determined Reverse Engineer who is willing to take every bit of the Zilog Z80 machine code of the game and to see what it does. There might be a way of painting a room without copying it or expanding it from another memory location. Therefore, the secret caves might never be found through a tool that extracts screens and that attempts to produce game maps.

I think that this game is truly memorable, since almost thirty years have passed since it has been published and we are still talking about it.

1. The horseshoe magnet isn't used.
2. You want to look through screens to see that there are no secret rooms there? Press in a game the key "P" (pause), and dial NOOTRAC4571. Then it is possible to glance over screens the Z, X, K, M, SPACE keys.

Works for the game ZX-Spectrum.

[quote data-userid="250" data-postid="85616"]

2. You want to look through screens to see that there are no secret rooms there? Press in a game the key “P” (pause), and dial NOOTRAC4571. Then it is possible to glance over screens the Z, X, K, M, SPACE keys.

[/quote]

Hi, Rindex.

Indeed, it is enough, after typing the magic character string "NOOTRAC4571" to cycle through the vector of screens only by repeatedly pressing the "X" key.

However - only to give a chance to the prophecy to be fulfilled - there is a possibility that a screen might be drawn otherwise and not through mere copying or expanding from the vector of screens. If a second possibility of drawing screens exists, then it might be possible to find both a usage for the HorseShoe Magnet and the locations of any secret caves.

If I am still not clear, then think of the memorable game "The Hobbit". The game did not have a vector of screens. It was painting each screen in a very slow, but effective way. If the secret caves are painted this way, then we have a chance that the prophecy might be true.

I have just seen the movie "The Terminal" with Tom Hanks, directed by Steven Spielberg. We might have been similarly cycling ourselves in the fantasy world of this game, for the last almost thirty years.

There are lots of things to be learned this way, though.

There are no secret caves there, it is possible not to look for. And here in Dizzy 3.5+4 (DizzyAGE remake) there are new locations. Both in Dizzy 3.5 and in Dizzy 4. But chtoa to get to them it is necessary to begin to play with 3.5

[quote data-userid="250" data-postid="85618"]

There are no secret caves there, it is possible not to look for.

[/quote]

You might be right, Rindex, but I think that it takes more than a cheat or a game map or a tool that extracts screens and produces game maps in order to convince me.

In order to mathematically prove that there is nothing hidden in the game, one should completely reverse-engineer the game and produce the mnemonics of the Zilog Z80 assembly source code of the whole game. This way, we could completely identify all of the routines that are used in the game.

By the way, you have just proven to me that there was a hidden routine that I was not aware of - the magic character string "NOOTRAC4571". I knew that there was such a thing in Dizzy II - "Treasure Island Dizzy (Magic Island Dizzy)", but I was not aware of such a routine being present in the first game.

Who knows, maybe I shall start again studying the Zilog Z80 Central Processing Unit. I remember one funny mnemonic name: "DJNZ" ("Decrement the register B and Jump if Not Zero").

By throwing a quick glance on the Internet, it seems that - surprisingly - there are people out there that are still interested in this topic:

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/1610/how-did-the-z80-instruction-set-differ-from-the-8080

Well, the surprise might not be that great since somebody has just released a remake for ZX Spectrum of the game "Dizzy VII: Crystal Kingdom Dizzy".

I remember the Sinclair mag in TID, but that' the only item i can recall not having a use. The bottle of whisky and hole in the bag were still usable.

Yes the Z comes from Zilog something i only learnt a few months ago, Not sure where to X came from.

[quote data-userid="55" data-postid="85620"]

but that’ the only item i can recall not having a use.

[/quote]

There were others also, Meph. I think that "Dizzy IV: Magicland Dizzy (Wonderland Dizzy)" starts with a dagger in the first screen, placed on the monolith, that you keep on carrying around until you finish the game without using it.

Again, the fact that nobody has found a usage to an object does not necessarily mean that the usage does not exist, for sure. It just means that nobody has found it, yet.

The dagger in Magicland was used to cut a Leaf and goat's rope.

Right. I have mistaken the game. It is "The Sharp Dagger" in Dizzy V: "Spellbound Dizzy", not in Dizzy IV: "Magicland Dizzy".

Here is another list, for the delight of all of the Dizzy fans who are out there, wondering what should they do with certain items.

There is this guy out there on the Internet, Lanzz. You probably know him. He writes very solid walkthroughs. I have compiled the following list of useless items for the first six Dizzy games.

The Comprehensive List of Useless Items inside the Dizzy Games

+____Game______#_Item Name_____________________Purpose
|
+____Dizzy I____29_A Horseshoe Magnet_____________Unknown
|
+____Dizzy II____4_A Tube of Toothpaste____________Unknown
|
+____Dizzy II___32_Sinclair Abuser Magazine_________This guy is sooo good.
+______________________________________________He managed to find a use
+______________________________________________for the Sinclair Abuser Magazine.
+______________________________________________Go right once more (through the lower path)
+______________________________________________and pick up Sinclair Abuser Magazine
+______________________________________________(a reference to the then bitter rivalry between
+______________________________________________Spectrum and Commodore owners).
+______________________________________________Make your way back at the start location
+______________________________________________and drop the Magazine on top of the small pebble
+______________________________________________in the water there for extra scores.
|
+____Dizzy III___7_A Bottle of Whiskey_____________This item is absolutely useless.
+______________________________________________If you pick this item, Dizzy will drink it
+______________________________________________when you try to drop it.
+______________________________________________It just makes Dizzy drunk
+______________________________________________and he starts walking in all directions.
|
+____Dizzy III___8_An Empty Bottle________________After Dizzy drinks the whiskey,
+______________________________________________he will leave an Empty Bottle.
+______________________________________________Leave this item because it is useless.
|
+____Dizzy III__22_A Large Round Hole_____________You can find a Large Round Hole
+______________________________________________at the same screen. If you pick it,
+______________________________________________you'll get a hole in your bag
+______________________________________________and everything you carry will drop out.
+______________________________________________Leave this item, because it is useless.
|
+____Dizzy IV___2_Empty Milk Bottle_______________Useless
|
+____Dizzy IV___3_A Bag of Rubbish________________Useless
|
+____Dizzy V___20_Sharp Dagger___________________Unknown
|
+____Dizzy VI___10_Some Fluffleade________________Joke Item
|
+____Dizzy VI___18_A Bottle of Potion_______________Joke Item
|
+____Dizzy VI___22_A Magic Carpet_________________Joke Item
|
+____Dizzy VI___26_Some Tasty Bread_______________Joke Item
|
+____Dizzy VII might not have any useless items.

 

@dobrescumihai19, such company cheats is almost in all parts.

Dizzy 1. Press in a game the key "P" (pause), and dial NOOTRAC4571. Then it is possible to glance over screens the Z, X, K, M, SPACE keys.
Dizzy 2. In the menu at the same time to press A+O+P+ENTER. In the game to press "C". Scrolling by Z, X, K, M, SPACE screens.
Dizzy 3. In the menu at the same time to press P+A+D+W+F+SPACE. In the game to press "C". Scrolling by Z, X, K, M, SPACE screens.
Dizzy 4. No cheats.
Dizzy 5. In the menu to dial IWANTANOMLETTE. In the game to press "C".
Dizzy 6. In the menu to dial IAMSTUARTSIDLEY. In the game to press "C". Scrolling by Z, X, K, M, SPACE screens.
Dizzy 7. In the menu at the same time to press T+U+R+B+O. The truth at me something hasn't earned.