Dizzy the Adventurer

Dizzy the Adventurer
Developer: Codemasters Publisher: Camerica Platforms: Unlicensed NES, Aladdin Deck Enhancer Released in US: 1993 This game has unused animations. This game has unused graphics. This game has unused text. This game has debugging material.

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An enhanced port of Dizzy: Prince of the Yolkfolk that was the pack-in title for the Aladdin Deck Enhancer.

Unused Font Characters

Punctuation and diacritics for languages beyond English are loaded into the game's font, yet only English text can be found in the ROM. All these and more would go on to appear in Wonderland Dizzy, but with drop shadows added. The colon also ends up unseen in this game because it's only included in an unused piece of text.

Unused Dizzy Sprites

There exist water physics and swimming animations for Dizzy that go unused because the game never allows Dizzy to survive underwater. Setting memory address $00A3 to nonzero enables Dizzy to swim, and setting $05B5 to nonzero activates the underwater physics that also enable Dizzy's front-facing swimming animation. These same sprites went on to be used in another belatedly-released game, Mystery World Dizzy.

The game also loads graphics tiles that would give Dizzy a frown and a "woozy" face. These faces do not appear to be used anywhere in this game nor in Mystery World Dizzy, but versions of them with a nose are seen in the Sega Master System and Game Gear ports of Fantastic Dizzy.

(Source: Dizzy9)

Invisible Background Textures

Unmodified	With a color lightened

The backgrounds behind dialog scenes appear to be single solid colors, but in fact they use a tile with two colors arranged into what could form a nice-looking pattern yet is never seen due to all palettes making the two colors identical. A clear indication that it was meant to be tiled this way is that the corners of word balloons contain portions of this pattern, allowing it to continue right up to their outer edges.

Unmodified	With lightening and darkening

Likewise, the border around the inventory consists of its own unique tile with three identical colors, forming what would have been a rocky texture similar to but distinct from the one used on the inventory menu itself.

(Source: Dizzy9)

Unused Text

THE SIGN READS:
 'NO TRESPASSERS'
        THE KING.

BUT IT WAS THAT EVIL WIZARD ZAKS THAT IMPRISONED ME IN THAT CAVE.

This block of text is found far away from other text in the ROM, but there still exists code to create an interactable object that displays it. It doesn't load proper graphics for a sign, however, so this may have been omitted due to object limitations with the jester in the same area.

Another oddity with this string is that the eighth space before "THE KING" is actually a separate character value $2D and seems intended to be a hyphen/dash, as seen placed between the comma and period in Wonderland Dizzy's font and the ASCII-based lookup table of The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy, but tile $2D is blank during dialogs in this game.

A HOLE

Like the coins from Treasure Island Dizzy, the hole cannot be kept in Dizzy's inventory, yet there is a name that appears if it is hacked into the inventory.

HELLO YOUR MAJESTY.

HAVE YOU FOUND YOUR TRUE LOVE YET, SIR DIZZY?

NOT YET SIRE, BUT I SHALL NOT GIVE UP.

It seems that this conversation should have played out if Dizzy spoke to the king again after returning his crown, but the game checks for the wrong status value and so never activates it.

(Source: Dizzy9)