Sprites

In the official adventure games, does anyone have any knowledge of the variation of the dizzy sprites?

For example, I notice that the Treasure Island Dizzy Amiga and ST versions have the same dizzy sprites because (as far as I can see) one is a graphically identical port of the other.

I could go through manually checking every version of every Dizzy adventure game, but if someone has knowledge of this already I thought I'd check first!

Even if you only have knowledge of one platform, that would be a great help.

Thanks!

Even if you only have knowledge of one platform, that would be a great help.

I only have knowledge of the Spectrum platform, and the Dizzy sprite was always the same. :wink:

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I only have knowledge of the Spectrum platform, and the Dizzy sprite was always the same. :wink:

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Thanks! That's a helpful start {dizzy}:dizsmile:

Yeah, there wasn't much variation in the sprites of the adventure games on the 8-bit computers. For 5 games the Amstrad CPC ports used a Dizzy sprite with red gloves and boots and a green body, with red eyes beginning with Treasure Island. In those same five games on Commodore 64 we got shifty-eyed all-white Dizzy. Then for Spellbound Dizzy they seemed to want to standardize the look across all systems, so on both the CPC and the C64 Dizzy looked as he did on Spectrum except with red boots and gloves and a black outline I believe. Dizzy even looked that way in the 16-bit ports, complete with the black eyes with white pupils, only with more colors and a "bouncing" sprite. The Commodore 64 port of Crystal Kingdom Dizzy kept the same sprites from Spellbound Dizzy and colorized the rest of the Yolkfolk similarly, but on Amstrad CPC there were all new "blocky-looking" sprites because of the different screen mode.

I mentioned the "standardization" of Spellbound Dizzy because in all the 16-bit computer games besides Spellbound Dizzy and Panic Dizzy there was a completely different set of sprites with each game, and Dizzy would always have white eyes with black pupils. MagicLand Dizzy's sprites looked a lot like Treasure Island Dizzy's though, maybe some slight differences in shading plus smoother animation. And Prince of the Yolkfolk looked a lot like MagicLand Dizzy but with green shading, and Dizzy's body no longer bobbed up and down when he stood still, only his hands did. Fantasy World Dizzy was the weird one where Dizzy actually wore a hat on his sprite and had a few custom death animations rather than the usual falling over. Crystal Kingdom Dizzy had the sprites where Dizzy turned his face side-to-side while walking, and he had some actions he doesn't have in other games like climbing, carrying an umbrella, riding a parachute, and turning into an angel after falling to his death. I think they tried to make Dylan look a little like his original sprite in that one...

Oh yeah, and palette can make a difference in how the sprites look even when they're directly ported. I noticed the limitations in the Atari ST's palette when I recorded Crystal Kingdom Dizzy, like how the gradient in the skies from the Amiga version was replaced with plain blue (just as it was in the Atari ST and PC versions of Prince of the Yolkfolk), metallic surfaces were missing a shade of gray, and various colors just looked a little washed-out, though I think that effect might have been intensified a little in preparing the video to go online. Like the humans are a little less tanned, and the fire-red color of Dizzy's boots and boxing gloves was trending more toward orange.

Likewise, I think the color used for the red on Dizzy's sprites in the NES games would show up a little purplish on many displays, but it was just considered the most reliable color to use. Otherwise, the Treasure Island Dizzy sprite looks a lot like the 16-bit ones minus the shading, and the Dizzy the Adventurer sprite looks a lot like the 16-bit Fantastic Dizzy sprites without the shading and with a new "laughing" animation. The sprites for both the Master System and Game Gear adventure games were very similar to the NES's Dizzy the Adventurer sprites, but with little adjustments like giving Dizzy a nose.

But the sprites for The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy on NES were very unique, and probably showed the widest range of emotion, unless you count the conversation portraits from 16-bit Crystal Kingdom Dizzy. A PPU Viewer is a fun emulator tool to use because it shows you how Dizzy's sprites weren't stored whole in memory; instead you mostly see arrays of gloves and shoes, then a series of half-faces, which get mirrored to produce Dizzy's body or combined with a blank back if he's walking, then the appropriate gloves and shoes are layered on top in the right places for each frame of animation. It's a neat way to save space for graphics, especially as some of those parts can be shared with other Yolkfolk, and it's how some NES sprites can appear to contain 4 or 5 colors when normally they're limited to 3--see how Dizzy was shaded with light gray even though he already had white, black, and red.

So then, if you like the arcade game sprites, they should be the same across the 16-bit platforms, but with the exception of Panic Dizzy for Amstrad, I believe all of them were redone from scratch for each of the 8-bit computers. I hope this helps your search!

Thanks Bag of Magic Food! That's really comprehensive. I'm going to see if I can compile a full sprite sheet for all the adventure games now...

Don't forget to look at what's already been done! This page has a few sprite sheets. Also I just remembered how the image on this page contained Dizzy's standing sprite from just about all the official games plus a few fan-made ones. Fun to see them all at once!

Is it possible to get at the original sprites from disk/tape file dumps?

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But the sprites for The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy on NES were very unique, and probably showed the widest range of emotion, unless you count the conversation portraits from 16-bit Crystal Kingdom Dizzy. A PPU Viewer is a fun emulator tool to use because it shows you how Dizzy’s sprites weren’t stored whole in memory; instead you mostly see arrays of gloves and shoes, then a series of half-faces, which get mirrored to produce Dizzy’s body or combined with a blank back if he’s walking, then the appropriate gloves and shoes are layered on top in the right places for each frame of animation. It’s a neat way to save space for graphics, especially as some of those parts can be shared with other Yolkfolk, and it’s how some NES sprites can appear to contain 4 or 5 colors when normally they’re limited to 3–see how Dizzy was shaded with light gray even though he already had white, black, and red.

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Actually,In NES version Dizzy have 2 additional "evil" sprites-they are unused(?).
Adventurer for nes also have unused swimming animation.
I'll write an article about unused contents of Dizzy games that I have discovered.

Good idea, The Cutting Room Floor could use some information about unused Dizzy game content too.

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Actually,In NES version Dizzy have 2 additional “evil” sprites-they are unused(?).
Adventurer for nes also have unused swimming animation.
I’ll write an article about unused contents of Dizzy games that I have discovered.

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How do you access this content?

Well as I said, try out various emulators and learn their debugging tools. FCEUX is an NES emulator with a PPU Viewer that shows all the tiles and palettes currently in use by a ROM; right-click on the tiles to see them in a different palette. I know there are tools for taking those tiles and arranging them into graphics how you like, but I mainly use the tile viewer to see if I've missed anything, or if something important changed, or if something unused was hidden in there. FCEUX also lets me map hotkeys for Toggle Background Display and Toggle Object Display. By turning off the background, you get all the sprites to appear floating in a blank void; take a screen snapshot of that, and you can just snip out the sprite you want in your favorite image editor. Alternatively, if you wanted to put together the game's world map, you could turn off sprites and get clean backgrounds. Other emulators may have background/object display options on a pull-down menu, especially if the system being emulated has more than two graphics layers.

A lot of emulators for old consoles have features like that because of how everything was stored the same way in a pretty small grouping. So those features may not be as common in emulators of general-use computers, but there may still be ways to get fairly clean sprites if you get creative. (Some PC games store their graphics in separate files in common formats that would just give everything away right there, but you probably won't get that lucky.) The 8-bit Dizzy games had to use mostly plain one-color backgrounds aside from the ground, so it shouldn't be too hard to separate the sprites from the background. (Unless the sprites share colors with the background, that is. Actually I think all the objects in the Spectrum-style games are set in some square black box, but once you find how big that box is, you can capture every object of that type in that same size box, and I'm sure it's all multiples of 8 anyway.) If there's a problem with the sprites overlapping the floors a bit, then at least with the player character and movable objects you can try hanging them off of cliffs, perhaps using one screenshot from an east-facing cliff and another from a west-facing cliff that you can stitch together.

Getting every frame of an animation can be tricky. It's easy to find a pause feature in an emulator for when you need to stop and see if you've got the right frame, but when it's a fast animation that you need to review slowly, you'll need to find some sort of frame-by-frame option. It could be called something like "Frame advance" or "Run next frame", but failing that, you can try setting the game speed to 1 FPS, which would mean the game will update the screen just once every second, giving you plenty of time to hit Pause when you see the graphic you need. Do any of these ideas help, or is there something else you're getting stuck on?

They do help. I'll look at that NES emulator when I get to the console sprites, but so far I've just been getting the 16-bit ones. I've been grabbing the sprites from STeem by running a frame at a time, though I was wondering if there was some decompiler that may chuck them out, because although it's fairly straightforward for the early Dizzy's, Crystal Kingdom and Fantastic have a load of extra bits like climbing etc and I don't want to miss any of these. Also there's things like Spellbound where I think I'll need to get the aqualung and get all the sprites again with that, but I guess I'll just have to replay the game til I get to that bit!

Huh, have you made any progress, Havelock? (It was a little worrying how you burst onto this forum with question after question, only to disappear just as quickly.)

I don't know much about DizzyAGE, but from what I've seen, it appears to have been supplied with packs of graphics extracted from all the ZX Spectrum adventure games, so I bet that well is pretty dry now. Well, I'm not sure about the Spectrum Dizzy sprite itself--the one that's just two colors, "light" and "dark", because Dizzy does have an outline on the Spectrum, but the colors he shows up in are based on what he walks in front of, so it's not so much that he's colored white as it is that the air he passes through is colored white. I noticed that sprite's outline is a bit incomplete, like on the side of one of Dizzy's hands, and under his feet when he's standing. I wonder what the status is on a full rip of those as opposed to the enhanced one that's standard to DizzyAGE.

A few weeks ago I was playing The Big 6 and made the observation that Fantastic Dizzy recycled a lot of graphics from previous Amiga Dizzy games. I think all the underwater creatures but the piranhas and lanternfish were also seen in Bubble Dizzy. Most of the main characters look exactly the same as they did in MagicLand Dizzy, with the exceptions of Dizzy (who got a new facial design with an open mouth and larger pupils, but is generally shaped the same) and Dylan (who curiously only appeared in bush form in 16-bit MagicLand, so I suspect the artist had to make him a new sprite for this game in the style of MagicLand based on how he looked in Fantasy World). Also the birds are from MagicLand Dizzy, the ones that replaced the mosquitoes from MagicLand Dizzy and replaced the bats from The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy. Can you find any other graphics in that game that are old? I want to say some of the fruit, but then, there are only so many ways you can draw a green apple...


Just today I got the idea to extract the sprites that are used in most of the Commodore 64 Dizzy games. I came to the realization that in MagicLand Dizzy and Dizzy Prince of the YolkFolk, Dizzy isn't just plain white, but also has black pixels in some places. So I went to the trouble of finding where all those black pixels were, attaching them to Dizzy's sprite where they covered up visible backgrounds. I soon found the easiest way to see all the black parts was to feed Daisy the "EatMe" cake and then wander around in front of the blank white screen. As I compiled the sprites, I started to notice a pattern...


(The first little ball is one of Dizzy's limbs. Four of them should fly in to Dizzy's growing face from the sides of the screen.)

The black areas don't make much sense as outlines or shadows, so I thought that they might be the aftereffects of a sloppy undraw routine. But there was a certain consistency to them. I started to notice what was going on when I got to the straight-up jumping sprites where the black parts protrude quite a bit, but to make sure, I lined up all the sprites precisely, composited all the black pixels, and got this!



Yep, so it appears that there is an unchanging black Dizzy face displayed underneath all of Dizzy's regular sprites. I don't know what purpose it could have served. Maybe it was from a test of motion where Dizzy was just a static face, and it was easier to leave it in recolored black while placing the full sprite set on top. Maybe it was just so you would still see something when Dizzy walked in front of over-enlarged Daisy. Whatever the case, this is the reason I copied 7 forward rolling sprites instead of 3, even though the rest were rotations of others, because the black face doesn't rotate and thus will protrude differently from different rotations of the jumping sprites. But if you want the look of the first 3 games, then you should be able to just take the black out.

Interesting discovery.

Hey Bag, I've been a bit busy but I did make headway into sprite capture. I have all but Fantastic Dizzy of the adventure game Dizzy sprites captured for 16-bit. My intention was to construct a Dizzy engine capable of being run on any current day PC without emulation that would play all existing games, but with added features to customise the playing experience, as simple as having a menu to save or load, or to switch the Dizzy sprite to your favourite version.

I only intended to remake TUCA to begin with after seeing Sherrat's awesome version. I really enjoyed it, but just felt there were a few things a little off. I wanted to remake TUCA so the original could be played more or less exactly as is on a modern PC sans emulation, but then a menu selection would allow you to "upgrade" to a 16-bit version in the style of say Spellbound, and potentially a "HD upgrade" to bring Dizzy into the new age of gaming as so many HD remakes are currently doing.

Interesting findings about the C64 sprites, it's like you uncovered the face of an evil dizzy there! I'm just limiting myself to looking at way to capture elements useful to a TUCA 16-bit remake at the moment, but am also collating a few "HD" sketches people have made for me for various items and backgrounds, and am now in the process of choosing an engine or going for my own to begin programming.

Can I check about those C64 sprites you posted... do those 4 walking images constitute the complete walking cycle? I found that on most 16-bit games the walking sprite was more like 7 or 8 images (after the arms return to his sides after 3 or 4 images, there is a very subtly different second sequence).

Yeah, to me it looked as if the animation uses that same image of the hands and feet far apart whether the last/next image would have the hand bent back or the hand reaching forward, and then it all reverses, creating the 8-frame walking sequence. So that one sprite gets away with swapping the left hand with the right hand and the left foot with the right foot as you see them because it's 2D.

I'm not even sure where that animation "should" start, as it varies when I play in slow motion, so I think the frame of animation for walking may be controlled by some sort of global timer. But as laid out on the sheet I made, the pattern would be 12341432.

And if you do find something I missed, you can let me know! (For now I've left out everything that appears to have been just imported from the Spectrum games, like title screen graphics, Dizzy after he hops into the minecart in Spellbound Dizzy or the basket in Prince of the YolkFolk, or the puff of smoke that everyone uses to enter and exit MagicLand.)

This past week I went ahead and captured some sprites unique to the Amstrad CPC Dizzy games. You know, the ones where he's bright green. First off:



Dizzy's sprite in the first game is slightly different from the following four adventure games. The main difference is that his eyes and mouth were filled in with red, and the holes in his shoes were filled in with white. I think this is because since Dizzy's 3 colors were made opaque in the second game rather than inverting in front of everything, it would be bad if he had holes in his graphic where bits of other things could show through and look weird. Like, they weren't able to give him a 4-color sprite with black pixels until Spellbound Dizzy for whatever reason. Actually, in the first game there wouldn't be any meaningful difference between black pixels and transparent pixels due to the 2-bit color "XOR" scheme it uses, where any color on top of black stays the same, any color on top of itself becomes black, and any non-black color on top of another non-black color produces the third non-black color.

Now, I took Havelock's concerns about the animations to heart and inspected the reversals a little more closely. One thing that's obvious is that the walking-right sprites are NOT mirror images of the walking-left sprites. The blob of white on Dizzy's head stays on the left side no matter which way he's facing, and when Dizzy's near hand is bent back partway walking left, it has an extra red pixel in the upper corner it doesn't have in the same pose walking right. Likewise, the forward jumping animation has 7 unique frames (plus the walking with arms down frame), as the sprites from 4 frames apart do not match at all if you flip them over, so they must have computed each rotation individually in a way that made them turn out differently. However, the sprites for jumping right are exact mirrors of those for jumping left this time, except the centering is a little different. I think maybe the standing and jumping in place graphics are considered to be a couple of pixels wider than those for moving forward; did you ever notice how Dizzy's body scoots one pixel to the left whenever he starts walking against a wall, on either side? But it is cool how, with the possible exception of jumping right, the light source on Dizzy's body stays consistent.

Another odd thing I noticed is that the walking-left animation doesn't reverse itself exactly. I don't know if any of these sprites are formed piecemeal like the Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy sprites, but for some reason, Dizzy's front toe sticks out more when he's bringing his near arm forward than when he's pulling it back. (It's not so easy to explain this on a still sheet of graphics, especially as I got the idea halfway through that left-facing graphics should be read right to left, so you just have to see it in action or remember: Near arm forward = big toe.) It's also not an exact mirror of how his feet are walking to the right, so I wondered if there was this square of three red pixels and one white that kept getting shifted around. I thought more about this after I captured sprites from Dizzy in Prince of the Yolkfolk...

As an aside, I took another peek at the ZX Spectrum version of Dizzy The Ultimate Cartoon Adventure and noticed that its sprites had some resemblance to the Commodore 64 sprites, with the hands that look like flippers because they aren't completely outlined, and the tall vertical gap look to the feet while jumping forward. So it appears that the Commodore 64 sprite wasn't too far off at first, but then it failed to evolve in the same way. The CPC sprites for Dizzy 1, on the other hand, already look more like the Treasure Island Dizzy sprites, so there must have been some extra work done before that version came out. Also, if the Spectrum sprite was limited to 24 pixels wide, then that would explain why one of Dizzy's hands isn't outlined on the outside. The Amstrad CPC sprite is essentially an odd number of pixels wide because it lacks the outline, and the middle column of pixels isn't doubled the way it is in the C64 sprites.



Now you already know that Dizzy gained red eyes, a red mouth, and an extra pair of white pixels on his shoes for the forward-facing sprites in the next four games, but I caught a few other little changes by lining up the sheets. One thing I noticed while playing is that a white pixel over Dizzy's eye turns green for one frame when he's walking right, when his arms are down and feet side-by-side, but only when bringing his near arm forward, not when pulling it back. Thus you only see that pixel flicker once per full walk cycle. That same sprite with the extra green pixel is also used when Dizzy jumps to the right.

The right-jumping sprites are not all exact mirrors of the left-jumping sprites anymore. The 3rd frame, with Dizzy's face pointed down and forward, had his back shoe filled in with another red pixel for both directions, but only the right-jumping sprite also removed the bottom pixel of Dizzy's eye. The 5th frame, with Dizzy pointed back and down, had an extra pixel of white added to his front shoe, but again only for jumping right. And the 7th frame, with Dizzy pointed back and up, added a white pixel to Dizzy's front foot and extended his mouth and front toe with another red pixel each, for the right only. This is why I got the idea that the coders put in twice as many sprites as they really needed for some animations, and sometimes the artists made adjustments to one copy but missed the other.

So, these sprites may have been updated inconsistently, but I like the idea of giving Dizzy an extra shade of color to make him look shiny. I bet you could replace the green with light gray and unite it with the black linework to create a Dizzy sprite that's a bit more modern but not too fancy.

Also, sometimes when I play Fantasy World Dizzy on Amstrad, the white parts of Dizzy will turn green when he passes in front of red or green objects, but other times that doesn't happen. What's that all about?

Maybe if I feel up to it, I could get the Crystal Kingdom Dizzy sprites next! It should be all right if I leave the pixels "doubled", right? I mean I know it's a 160x200 mode so they should be considered single pixels, but that would make them look extremely thin on a normal monitor, and it shouldn't be a problem to convert them back to single pixels if you need to.


I just remembered something: Some games have "idle" sprites for when you make your character just stand still for a while, so don't forget to look for those too. I know in 16-bit Fantasy World Dizzy, Dizzy taps his foot after a few seconds, and in Go Dizzy Go, Dizzy and Denzil have a few different idle animations where they look around nervously and such.

wasn't the green version 'evil dizzy' ??

Yeah, they made the Dizzy doppelganger green in the 16-bit versions... Hey, maybe they were inspired by the CPCs!