Yeah I guess it's time for the pirate ship stuff now.
Blackheart's ship, blue version
Blackheart's ship, red version
Bubble pit, blue version
Bubble pit, red version
Not much to say about the bubble mini-game, but that it was a very quick one to map in the blue version, while the stars were a little annoying to capture because they drag a few pixels behind while scrolling, as usual. It didn't seem beneficial to add any other sprites, because you can guess Dizzy is going to fall straight down to the middle from the end of the plank, and then the bubbles are random.
I like how the second bird you see on the first section of the ship is on a very long leash, able to fly anywhere above that top deck. A lot of the stars in the red version there were added to make you have to walk into the dead-end passages that otherwise served no purpose but to confuse you, but then there's just one silly star added to the bottom-right corner that you can't miss because it's right on top of a key item. And on top of that is an acid drop that falls very infrequently compared to the others; interesting that they bothered to include a "frequency" variable for a simple enemy like that.
The one major change to the terrain was up in the rigging, where the first jump to the left needed its platform extended of course, but then a long platform on the right was actually shortened so that you can continue jumping to the right once you land on the second rope point below that. Oh, and they added another star on the far right, so ignore what I said about hanging onto the rope unless you're playing version 1; you'll have to stop and go to that star on the right first, then either climb up and over or swing back over to the left, whichever turns out to be faster.
Also, as I was messing around with poking Dizzy's position, I found that the platform Blackheart stands on is real, but Dizzy can walk through Blackheart harmlessly up there, hm. Messing with Dizzy's position to get him in the water there, around the outside of the ship, and/or underneath the boarding ramp, also drops Dizzy into glitchy versions of other areas where many of the enemies fail to appear, Dizzy can't interact with any objects but stars, and edge exits lead to the wrong places. (I recall seeing a way to do this without cheats, I think by jumping backwards onto Blackheart on Dock Street, but I can't find the video about it now.) I think it's similar to some glitches done in TASes of early MegaMan games, where part of the game code thinks the hero character is in one place, while another part of it thinks he's many screens away. Something this reveals about how the game is coded is that death pits are objects placed at absolute coordinates, not part of the regular terrain, as in the glitchy mode Dizzy will simply fall through them into new areas, even the forest pit full of spikes! The waterfall pit traps Dizzy at the bottom, though. Also interesting is how the trigger for "walking the plank" is quite the hard X-coordinate check, as there's no way to escape from it once you've passed it: Even if Dizzy is falling under the plank, the bottom edge now takes him straight to the bubble game!
So I may not have drawn any ropes, but I did feel like mapping the door of that locked compartment in both positions. Something strange I learned you can do there is to stand in the middle of that space and continuously jump in place. Every other time Dizzy reaches the next screen, he'll take a smidgen of damage from something you probably can't see: It's a mouse, which is first spawned in mid-air there, but is suddenly warped over to its boundary on the very next frame. It's just a dumb side effect of the way enemies are relocated when a new screen is loaded.
I learned a few things on the way to Blackheart, too. Did I ever mention that in the NES versions of the game, if you jump into the end of a tunnel, Dizzy will automatically jump out of the tunnel in a standing pose when he appears on the street? It turns out that if you hit B at the right moment as Dizzy exits a tunnel, he may slide out of there at running speed while spinning around to grab/drop something. So that's another way to drop an object without stopping, even when you aren't collecting something at the same time. You can even combine A and B to make Dizzy jump and grab at the air, which may be the easier way to do it in real time. And if you're ever forced to wait out the time Dizzy spends eating a fruit for some reason, jumping before grabbing it so that Dizzy jumps in place while eating is funny too.
I noticed that when you throw the meat to the boar, it takes away your ability to pick up objects for a few seconds longer than normal; even trying to pick up objects during a jump doesn't work. So, uh, I guess it really doesn't help to try to set down your stuff and pick it up in a new order there.
As I was going for screenshots of buying the magic bean today, I rediscovered a trick I learned in the Genesis version that also works in the NES versions: You can fall through the space beneath Dylan's elevator from where you grab his door key, so long as you've already plugged in the elevator key. The cool thing is that even if the elevator has already descended, you can trick it into going back up by simply jumping anywhere on the right half of that platform that held Dylan's door key. Another thing I wondered about as I traveled was how the game is a bit inconsistent about whether Dizzy will roll when he jumps down from a height of 16 pixels, such as up 2 stairs in the town. He usually doesn't if I start him from a standstill by jumping in place first.
By the way, I wonder if I should have started using the Name Table Viewer sooner, if only to see where the true edges of loaded maps were. I noticed that in the mine cart game, the stuff on the right side of the name table was just a big field of tile 03, followed by the status bar, so that would explain the pattern I was seeing when the screen shook. (Can you tell that I've been sitting on this post for a few days during the site's downtime?)
I also played the SMS version again just to compare a few things, and while I was messing around, I got up to Shamus with the magic bean but not the shamrock. So I tried inching up to him while dropping the bean, and eventually I got the beanstalk to sprout, even though Shamus was still in the way. I couldn't jump onto the stalk without getting knocked back, but as Dizzy's damage maxed out on the last jump, he got knocked upwards and landed on the cloud above. Surely enough, this started Dizzy out on the cloud when he returned to life, meaning that bribing Shamus to move is no longer necessary to reach Zaks' castle in that version! It does mean wasting 2 extra lives to transport 5 objects up there, though. Sometime someone should test whether this actually requires the beanstalk to be there and whether it works in any other version of the game.
I also discovered that opening the inventory in the SMS version resets where Dizzy will respawn after he dies. It's probably not too useful since all you could grab and snap back from would be stars, and you'd typically be fine with going back to the room entrance anyway, but it's nice to keep in mind if you need to kill off Dizzy for any reason.
