Eh, okay, here's that Crystal Kingdom Dizzy sprite sheet I'd been sitting on for a while:
Turns out the screen size for this CPC version was still 256x192, or 128x192 if you count the doubled pixels as single.
This must be the most colorful of any "8-bit" Dizzy sprites, having 7 or 8 colors all together. Dizzy's shoes alone contain 3 colors! Don't miss the light blue that's used for certain edges of Dizzy's eyes, and for outlining the stars when they pass in front of Dizzy's face. Interestingly, those stunned sprites can be flipped, I guess depending on which direction Dizzy was last headed.
I didn't always bother to get most of the sprites centered with each other the way they are in the game. It wasn't really possible to deduce the vertical centering for the jumping sprites anyway, as Dizzy no longer gets stuck against low ceilings for a while, but bounces straight down instead. Also I thought none of the sprites would be wider than 22 pixels (or 11 "fat" pixels), until I got to that one swimming sprite that turned out to be 12/24 pixels wide!
There was some guesswork with the edges of the swimming sprites too, as there wasn't any solidly non-black background that I could get Dizzy in front of in the water. Dizzy can appear in front of the fish--between flashes from damage--but only if he is swimming no higher than they are. I think what's going on is that graphics are drawn top to bottom, so lower objects appear in front of higher ones. Did you ever notice how Dizzy walks in front of NPCs, but jumps behind them? That would be one way to figure out where their edges are if you wanted to rip their graphics too.
It appears that black was used not only to fill in Dizzy's eyes and mouth, but also to ensure there were no holes in Dizzy's sprite, as you see when his feet are close to something but not quite overlapping. The jumping sprites are interesting because some frames are simple flips of the 4th frame over, but the up-and-forward graphic is slightly different from the down-and-back one. Also they obviously couldn't do 90-degree rotations of anything with the fat pixels, so when Dizzy is flat facing up or down is its own sprite. When Dizzy is completely upside-down during the spin, that uses a flip of the walking sprite where his arm is straight down and feet together, but when Dizzy is right-side-up while jumping or falling, he uses the sprite where his arm's gone forward a bit, oddly enough.
I don't think I'll be doing more sprite ripping any time soon, but I had a couple more observations about Dizzy sprites. I might have said before, Fantastic Dizzy in 16-bit seems to have been developed for Genesis first, but recycles some graphics from previous Amiga Dizzy games, right? Well, I was looking at some of CodeMasters' other Amiga games, and noticed that the diamonds you find in the mine in Fantastic Dizzy look exactly like one of the kinds of diamonds you can collect in Captain Dynamo--not a Dizzy game, but drawn by the same artist! Who knows how much Leigh Christian may have been cribbing from himself in order to get Fantastic Dizzy's new graphics finished on time?
I also realized something about Spellbound Dizzy on Commodore 64. I had noticed for a while that Dizzy was close to his standard sprite, but something was off about the shape of his feet, and later I noticed that Dizzy's hands didn't look the same. Do you remember anyone pointing out that in the standard Dizzy sprite, Dizzy's feet aren't outlined on the bottom, and one of his hands isn't outlined on the side? Well, I think what happened was that someone involved with the C64 port of Spellbound Dizzy didn't like that Dizzy's outline was incomplete, but wasn't able to extend the sprite another pixel in any direction, and so they just changed the red edges of the hand and feet into black, making them look a little stubby.
Turns out the screen size for this CPC version was still 256x192, or 128x192 if you count the doubled pixels as single.
This must be the most colorful of any "8-bit" Dizzy sprites, having 7 or 8 colors all together. Dizzy's shoes alone contain 3 colors! Don't miss the light blue that's used for certain edges of Dizzy's eyes, and for outlining the stars when they pass in front of Dizzy's face. Interestingly, those stunned sprites can be flipped, I guess depending on which direction Dizzy was last headed.
I didn't always bother to get most of the sprites centered with each other the way they are in the game. It wasn't really possible to deduce the vertical centering for the jumping sprites anyway, as Dizzy no longer gets stuck against low ceilings for a while, but bounces straight down instead. Also I thought none of the sprites would be wider than 22 pixels (or 11 "fat" pixels), until I got to that one swimming sprite that turned out to be 12/24 pixels wide!
There was some guesswork with the edges of the swimming sprites too, as there wasn't any solidly non-black background that I could get Dizzy in front of in the water. Dizzy can appear in front of the fish--between flashes from damage--but only if he is swimming no higher than they are. I think what's going on is that graphics are drawn top to bottom, so lower objects appear in front of higher ones. Did you ever notice how Dizzy walks in front of NPCs, but jumps behind them? That would be one way to figure out where their edges are if you wanted to rip their graphics too.
It appears that black was used not only to fill in Dizzy's eyes and mouth, but also to ensure there were no holes in Dizzy's sprite, as you see when his feet are close to something but not quite overlapping. The jumping sprites are interesting because some frames are simple flips of the 4th frame over, but the up-and-forward graphic is slightly different from the down-and-back one. Also they obviously couldn't do 90-degree rotations of anything with the fat pixels, so when Dizzy is flat facing up or down is its own sprite. When Dizzy is completely upside-down during the spin, that uses a flip of the walking sprite where his arm is straight down and feet together, but when Dizzy is right-side-up while jumping or falling, he uses the sprite where his arm's gone forward a bit, oddly enough.
I don't think I'll be doing more sprite ripping any time soon, but I had a couple more observations about Dizzy sprites. I might have said before, Fantastic Dizzy in 16-bit seems to have been developed for Genesis first, but recycles some graphics from previous Amiga Dizzy games, right? Well, I was looking at some of CodeMasters' other Amiga games, and noticed that the diamonds you find in the mine in Fantastic Dizzy look exactly like one of the kinds of diamonds you can collect in Captain Dynamo--not a Dizzy game, but drawn by the same artist! Who knows how much Leigh Christian may have been cribbing from himself in order to get Fantastic Dizzy's new graphics finished on time?
I also realized something about Spellbound Dizzy on Commodore 64. I had noticed for a while that Dizzy was close to his standard sprite, but something was off about the shape of his feet, and later I noticed that Dizzy's hands didn't look the same. Do you remember anyone pointing out that in the standard Dizzy sprite, Dizzy's feet aren't outlined on the bottom, and one of his hands isn't outlined on the side? Well, I think what happened was that someone involved with the C64 port of Spellbound Dizzy didn't like that Dizzy's outline was incomplete, but wasn't able to extend the sprite another pixel in any direction, and so they just changed the red edges of the hand and feet into black, making them look a little stubby.