Fantasy World Dizzy (ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC)

Fantasy World Dizzy is the third numbered entry in the Dizzy adventure platformer series, and one of the most highly-regarded ones. It introduced the cast of Dizzy's friends and relatives (meaning he isn't alone in this world anymore), the revamped inventory menu, and brought back the concept of lives. The Spectrum and CPC versions, which are the originals, do feature some inexplicable bugs and oversights, such as being able to grow the beanstalk without ever using the bean.

Source code of this game was made available in 2019.

Screen Select#

In the ZX Spectrum version, on the title screen, hold the keyboard keys P, A, F, W, D (stands for Philip, Andrew, Fantasy World Dizzy) and press one of the starting keys. In the Amstrad CPC version, on the title screen, hold the keyboard keys D, Y, L, A, N (Dylan is the name of one of the characters in the game) and press one of the starting keys. Next up, press C on the keyboard to enable screen select mode, in which you can use the keys Z, X, K and M in order to switch between the game's screens, and the Space bar to drop into a given screen. The title screen combination in both versions also seems to check for whether the keys Q, G, K, V, T are not held, which is likely to have been bruteforce protection.

Unused Text#

Unknown string#

tapeload.diz

Message from the audio department#

This amazing speech was done by L.Sharp who wrote the code & G.Raeburn who did the digitizing on his C64............

Neither Lyndon Sharp nor Gavin Raeburn were credited in the game's cassette inlay.

Early item name#

A:BOTTLE:OF:WINE

Name for the unused item "A BOTTLE OF WINE", which is most likely an early name for "A BOTTLE OF WHISKEY", one of the various items that can be picked up and used in the game.

Unused Music#

To do: This game has more unused sound effects than used ones.

Music ID 4 is a short ditty that could've been used for anything. Some of the possible use cases could've been Dizzy completing puzzles (a different fanfare is used for this purpose in Dizzy the Adventurer) or getting the bag upgrade. Use POKE 25029,4 to replace the in-game theme with this fanfare on loop, or POKE 42816,4 to let it play once instead of the death theme (a downside of the latter is that the textbox sound effect overlaps the music).