To the mines!
Blue diamond mines
Red diamond mines
Blue railway track
Red railway track
Some observations:
When you chop the bridge over Silver Stream, it removes five logs. Four of them are replaced by sprites that hang down, but the middle one just disappears!
The three floors of the mine interior are all the same length and match up on both edges, no shifting necessary, although I had to cheat to get into the wall to scroll the bottom floor all the way to the left. (Hacking Dizzy's position also revealed that no, there's nothing behind the dragon, don't get excited.) The rock formations fit together very nicely across all four floors. Can't say the same for those support beams that don't reach the ground! It's funny to notice that just before you reach the cymbals, you stand on a thin layer of rock directly over the dragon.
I'm pretty certain that bat on the middle floor always starts a lot farther to the right in the red version than in the blue version; that coordinate's not so variable like its height. I don't know if I mentioned this before, but I can't figure out how to capture flying enemies' positions more accurately because there's some oscillating "flapping" motion that positions the graphic higher or lower than what the Y coordinates I find tell me, and when the coordinates are loaded, it seems as if the enemy gets to move in a random direction for a frame before those memory values show up, because they vary by a pixel or two either way.
The blue version's elevator controls are unique for using a button toggle puzzle instead of an item, but did you know that the set of which switches are already activated is randomly generated whenever you enter the mine? In fact, it's possible to enter with all four switches on if you're lucky enough, so I think it's a lot faster to spend a bit of time manipulating your luck outside rather than pushing even a single button. There are only 16 possibilities, and waiting 1 frame changes what you get, so it should take less than a second.
I noted before that collecting stars in the red version doesn't make enemies or other kinds of items disappear, but I don't know if I realized that it
can make you unable to collect other
stars. I think some stars will have to be collected during backtracking in that version just because they were too close to other ones and it would take too long to wait for them to reappear.
The surfaces of the lava pools are more of those "load in tiles" animations, and the two tiles have their animations staggered so you can't really say which ones are supposed to match up together. I picked the Crystal Falls capture by which frame of the animation had the least color clash; for the lava, I think I went by what had the most symmetry, or what filled out the dimensions of the graphic, or what was... pretty? Oh well, it's all arbitrary.
You know how I said you can just barely jump through the dragon's flames in the blue version? Well, I just found out that I
can't do it in the red version. Even though I had Dizzy's higher speed, frame advance, and savestate abuse to work with, it appears that the dragon also breathes fire much faster, and I couldn't work out a safe opening. Maybe someone smarter than me can figure out a way, but this may end up being a blue-only sequence break. Also, the logic of whether the dragon lets you pass gets a little goofy if you play around with stealing the eggs and re-entering and setting them back down, but I don't think it's that important, so someone else can try to figure out all the rules too.
In the mine cart ride, the trolls are given 1 of 3 palettes randomly, with randomness affected there by which tracks you've taken so far. Since I saw no reason to prefer one, I cycled through all three colors throughout the map, which may make it easier to remember what the last troll you saw on it was as you browse it. The second troll appears twice on the map because it will appear on whichever track you take, so you have to avoid it either way. I don't know why that wasn't done with any of the other trolls in the rest of the mini-game.
I noticed that when the ground fissures form, the screen shakes, and it gets randomly displaced to the left by up to 3 pixels. (A rare case of multi-directional scrolling in this game!) So I took screenshots and added in as many of those 3 pixels on the right as I could manage. In the longer quakes, I saw a pattern: 192 pixels of a ground tile, then 48 pixels of plain black, just like the split between the play area and the status bar. If I copy that pattern across the right side, it matches up with all the other quake edges I caught, suggesting that there are 240-pixel-tall screens of this stuff repeated somewhere. I end up with only 24 pixels of black at the bottom, though, and the total height is 24 away from a multiple of 240, so maybe the game is starting 24 pixels away from the true bottom, but I don't know how to alter the scrolling safely, so I think it's good enough. I noticed the 16-bit versions of this game actually extend the graphics to over 320 pixels, and I think they shake the screen over to the
right.
Now, just because a fissure crosses a track on the map doesn't mean you can't take that track--remember I'm just recording their end states. All fissures are avoidable by staying at the top of the screen. In the blue version, one fissure lasts so long while you travel at such a high speed that it doesn't finish extending before it's scrolled off the screen, and the end of it appears 240 pixels up!
The fissures were one thing that was changed in the red version. They're all shorter! In fact, almost all of them are shortened enough that they don't threaten Dizzy, and the one that still does cross a track I had a tough time getting killed by because its hit detection is buggy. I was a little disappointed that the game wimped out like that, but consider that there are now
20 stars to collect on the tracks, and you can understand that it would be unfair to punish the player for hanging back when they need to see which track contains the next star. (I looked at the Genesis map and noticed the falling boulders were the same way: Only a few boulders actually land on the track, and some of those are where trolls were anyway. Oh, and also some stars are on different tracks, so don't use one version's map for the other.)
Another change is that while the blue version's cart speeds up multiple times, the red version only speeds up once near the end, only reaching the second speed from the blue version. So again it's a little easier, but helpful for making decisions about where to go for the stars next. The stars themselves actually make the ride easier the
first time you play, as they show where a safe path must be. Those changes made it so I couldn't capture quite as much of the right edge, but on the bright side, the fact that the ride takes longer in the red version means that you get to hear a full loop of the music! Yay?
I noticed about halfway through that the time when the cart ride speeds up seems to depend on Dizzy himself passing over a certain point, not just the screen scrolling to it, so you should note those points and make sure to hug the top of the screen then. How soon the speed-up begins can affect other subtle things like making the next troll appear one pixel higher than usual. The stars jiggle over their normal positions in these vertical scrollers because they seem to only catch up with the scrolling every other frame.
It's interesting to note that although Dizzy's cart takes off to the left in the regular side-view area, the exits are progressively further to the right, so I like to imagine that his cart made a 180 just off-screen.
When Dizzy exits the cart in the red version, he may slide a bit to the left from the momentum he had entering the cart, or to the right if you hit the backwards butterfly. Except, that doesn't happen for the third exit, so maybe they decided to neutralize Dizzy's momentum just in case it made him slip off. And for the fourth exit in both versions, Dizzy automatically rolls off to the right, but if you die before leaving Bridge Street, Dizzy will reappear standing normally at that exit. Nothing strange happens up there, though.
The second exit is the most interesting. I found it was the red version that added the ability to re-enter through that exit and appear in front of the mine cart. If you get stranded there in the blue version, you have to die in order to re-appear at the mine cart, but you can do that in the red version too. It's a mysterious conditional thing; I think the way it works is that if you die before leaving Carber Bay and without holding the aqualung or the flippers, then you respawn in the mine. Otherwise it just uses your last entrance like usual, as either the flippers or aqualung will allow you to leave safely, and reaching higher ground shows that you were able to as well.
And there's a weird bug where sometimes when you move the cart forward into an exit, Dizzy will act as if he crashed on it and die instead of exiting as he should. I know it last happened when I was testing the second exit in the red version, so don't hold a button into the exit when you're playing casually, I guess.
When I was playing around in Carber Bay, I noticed a serious problem with the red version's controls. Whereas in the blue version your main issue is that jumps are often just barely reachable, in the red version you tend to have more problems with landing on short platforms because you have to deal with a slippy-slidey Dizzy who rolls too fast and slides right off those platforms. I found it was next to impossible to jump onto the sunken galleon the normal way, and it's suicide with the crabs running around. If you want to get on top of the ship without the flippers, I recommend getting onto the ledge to the right first and running off with a moderate amount of speed, and you should land right on the treasure chest. You know, that treasure chest that I think should have been replaced with a stepstool or something for those who never played Treasure Island Dizzy on a platform other than NES where they would have been forced to use an empty treasure chest that way. I guess it helps that it's labeled "empty", so they don't think they need a key to open it and get the treasure, but that just makes them think they have to put something into it then. It's really just there to fit the "ol' pirate ship" theme.
Lately I watched a playthrough of Fantasy World Dizzy, and I found it interesting that almost all of its puzzles were repeated in some form in The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy. This fits with the rumor that The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy was originally going to be a port of Fantasy World Dizzy. The layout of the world is completely different, though, so I wonder if the programmers started by making sure all the puzzles worked before creating any of the lands Dizzy would roam. I noted before that Treasure Island Dizzy also had a lot of its puzzles revisited in Fantastic Dizzy as well as its item system to some degree, but I think this game even takes after the original Dizzy with its "Dodging small animals EVERYWHERE" style! So although it's a whole new world, Fantastic definitely took a "Dizzy's Greatest Hits" approach to the elements of the adventure.
A more important fact I noticed about that mini-game was the rubberband difficulty, where the number of points you have determines how many guards you can see at once. If your score falls between 3/8 and 1/8, you can see as many as 4 guards simultaneously. At 4/8 and 5/8, that drops to 3 guards. Then at 6/8 you only get 2 at a time, and at 7/8 you're going for the 1 that got away! This could be useful to remember for luck manipulation, in case holding off on shooting a guard for a moment allows the next one to appear sooner from the lower score.
One more thing I noticed as I collected the winch wheel to reach that castle was that when you first climb up to the riggings of Blackheart's ship, you can make the ascent to the platform above you in one rope swing rather than two; just hang on and let Dizzy swing back to the left, and he will get just enough height to jump up there if you time it right. This can be considered another NES-exclusive trick like the Select-button damage freezing and the collecting of objects in the air and while rolling, since other versions of Fantastic Dizzy force Dizzy to jump off the rope at a certain point automatically.
Now the sad thing is that I did a search just the other day to be sure no one else had started maps of the 8-bit versions of this game... And it turns out Blublu already had, back in 2006: http://www.vgmaps.com/forums/index.php?topic=150.0
Blublu might have even had most of it done! Did anyone save the files from those Imageshack links that are now dead, if only so I can compare how I'm doing? I wonder if it's worth asking Blublu, whose last post was a year ago, though Blublu hasn't really been active on the board since 2009. (I'll admit Blublu was credited for Kickle Cubicle last month, though!)
What makes me mad isn't that you need to jump off one particular pixel, but that even if you do jump from that exact pixel, there's a good chance it will fail and Dizzy tumbles off the next block anyway. Success there just seems random! I've tried all sorts of ways to make that jump easier with no real luck. The platform with the rat on the right doesn't seem to work, as Dizzy's jump is always a little too short from there. I even looked for an invisible rope hook somewhere, but nope. The one thing that seemed to help was if I started about 3 pixels from the starting spot of that jump, walked those 3 pixels over, then immediately jumped to the right--but I can't see anyone pulling that off with a D-pad in real time! Why didn't they test this more? How could they send the game out like that?! *GRUMBLE GRUMBLE*
The one nice thing is that you don't actually need to do the same jump to the next block on the right; Dizzy's jump is just high enough to go directly to the block with the hanging spider on the left, where you can't fall off to the left because the gap's too narrow, and if you get yourself some spider immunity, then you can take it easy at that point. ...Still, the fact that they made it appear that you needed to do the impossible jump twice... >:-(
Um, maybe I should move on and mention that the Blackheart's ship map is well on its way. In there the artists were much more dedicated to the 32 rows of duplicated pixels concept, as I only noticed one flaw in the background art copying--maybe that cannon was added later on? There are some things I was debating with myself about adding, like where exactly Blackheart jumps down to make you walk the plank, or where you can swing the rope from--I mean, hey, you can see where the rope attaches, but you don't know where to throw it from but by experimenting, and sometimes the same hook can be grabbed from more than one spot! I probably won't add them, though, since they might be too obvious or cluttering in a confusing way. One thing that does occur to me would be good to add is what characters give to you when you trade something, like with Denzil, Grand-Dizzy, Dylan, Dozy, Prince Clumsy, and the shopkeeper, just so there's a record of where every object first appears.
