A Horseshoe Magnet and a Secret cave?

[Dizzy19]

Dizzy19, such company cheats is almost in all parts.

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+____Thanks, Rindex, you are truly an endless resource of Dizzy helping lists.
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+____I have also been playing recently "Dizzy III: Fantasy World Dizzy" for IBM-PC Compatibles: MS-DOS in a DOSBox. There, one has to enter a high-score first and then to input his name as "IMMORTAL" in order to get infinite lives.
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+____This type of cheats is great, but it does not help as much as saving the current state of the game. One has to use the hibernating feature of Windows in order to save the current state of the whole operating system.
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+____I guess that they also had at CodeMasters a game engine such as the Dizzy Adventure Game Engine (DizzyAGE). They were continuously improving it, as they were releasing new Dizzy games. They were just changing the combination of keys used as a cheat. That is why apparently nothing works for Dizzy IV and Dizzy VII. Maybe they did not enable the cheat system for Dizzy IV and the key combination might be wrong for Dizzy VII.
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[Rindex]

Answer on a question about a magnet.

http://www.the-tipshop.co.uk/cgi-bin/info.pl?name=Dizzy

[Dizzy19]

Answer on a question about a magnet.

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+___"Wondering how to use the magnet?"
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+___"I happen to know (on account of just being on the blower to Sally Ann at CodeMasters), that the magnet isn't used for anything at all. It's a magnetic RED HERRING!" (Phil South in "Your Sinclair" issue 33 , Page 41) 4397
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+___In a certain dialect of the English language, the blower is the telephone.
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+___In the same or in another dialect, the red herring is something, especially a clue, that is or that is intended to be misleading or distracting.
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+___As for Adz.M's first post within this thread that he posted ten years without four days ago, we have to take into consideration the possibility that somebody might have played a prank on him.
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Playing this game on the Spectrum today, I remembered long ago asking about The HorseShoe Magnet and the answer was: "It activates something that reveals a secret cave". I still don't know whether it's true or not. I'm trying almost everywhere that looks suspicious.

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+___Therefore, that is all, Yolk Folks, as CodeMasters have officially confirmed that The HorseShoe Magnet is useless. Also, there are no other unknown secret caves. The highest possible score is 91,600 points. Game over. We can even lock this thread.
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[DCT]

Yeah, I'm not sure we're entirely remembering the point here. In Dizzy at the end of the game there are numerous things that will have been left unfinished including several enemies left unkilled because Dizzy is unable to reach them. We know this.

We also know, if we're reading the screen scrolls, there is an area on the map called the secret cave. We can go to the screen and we can see it, but the 'secret' area the term refers to is above Dizzy's head an utterly inaccessible from there. It contains an extra life that can't be collected and a bat that can't be killed all because there is no obvious access to the area. This is no surprise, the area is called the 'secret' cave so it would stand to reason that the way to get in would be a secret.

So far as I can tell no one has ever discovered the secret or shared the secret in all the years since the game was published. The theory in this thread appears to be that the horseshoe magnet has some role in revealing that secret, which may or may not be the case. But if it's a secret, there may even be more people that don't know it that do. Even people at Codemasters may not all be privy and may not all wish to share it if they are.

I can see three possibilities:

1. The secret cave is accessible by means current unknown, the 'secret' is currently undiscovered.
2. The secret cave is inaccessible because memory constraints prevented the secret being preserved in the game, the area was however as it was easier than unpicking the whole map.
3. The secret cave is inaccessible because the Oliver twins have a mean streak and deliberately put in to frustrate us. The seems unlikely to me as they don't tend to come across that way although since both the horseshoe magnet, if it really does nothing, and the hungry skeleton, which also does nothing obvious, both remain in the game taking up memory but serving no obvious purpose, gives some support to the possibility.

4. A fourth possibility, that I think is not very likely at this time is that the reason the horseshoe magnet doesn't work is a coding error and it was intended to have functions similar to those we speculate about.

Until we not for sure which of these possibilities is correct, we should keep in mind the possibility that the secret cave is accessible even if it turns out that the horseshoe magnet isn't the way to get in.

[Meph]

Only the Twins will know the answer, if they can remember. Who knows what paper work they've got in the vaults that could shed some light on the biggest Dizzy mystery.

[Dizzy19]

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+___Hi, everyone.
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+___I am restating my confidence: this is just a problem of Self-Determination.
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+___I do not see the Reverse Engineering of 48 KiloBytes or of 128 KiloBytes of Binary Data such a challenging task. I see that our Russian friends are still retro-programming on the Sinclair "Speccy" ZX-Spectrum microcomputer. It is just a matter of time until they will produce the Assembly Code Routines that will reveal all of the possible functionality hidden within the game.
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+___Once that is done, there will be nobody left who would still be able to talk about any secret. Whatever is in those KiloBytes of Binary Data is finite and well-determined.
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