Next up, we have something quite special that we found lurking within the disks of Mark Greenshields when backing everything up from his archive. A quite early build of Spindizzy, but with what seems to be a lot of the map intact.
There are a lot of differences here too. The score panel isn’t finished, the colour schemes haven’t been properly set up and there is only one main sprite (a sphere). The controls are also not very fine tuned, so its very hard to navigate around.
We think that there is a lot of the map present, but there could be screens which never made the final cut still to discover. There might be other features as well. Just to be warned that the preview is a bit temperamental, so pressing certain keys will crash it out.
So what was this? It was just frozen and stored on a disk labelled “Spindizzy Preview” with a few other cracked titles. Was this sent by the author to a friend and then subsequently leaked? If so – why isn’t it already out there in the wild?
Let us know if you find anything interesting and we’ll update the page over time, but for now – enjoy an early glimpse at Paul Shirley’s classic.
Contributions: Mark Greenshields
Awesome!
I loved playing Spindizzy in 1986 on my Amstrad.
Later, I found an Amstrad emulator and was able to download the Spindizzy ROM, and that’s when I got the idea to take screenshots to create a complete map of the game!
And I succeeded, it took a long time, but luckily I had infinite lives!
Much later, around 2008, I contacted Paul Shirley after finding his email on some forums and showed him the complete map of his game.
He was surprised that I’d managed to create the complete map of his game Spindizzy, and he admitted he’d never seen it in its entirety!
Regards,
Alain
Do you still have any contact information for Paul Shirley?
I work on a free/open source remake of Spindizzy for PC (called “IsoRealms Spindizzy”), so I’d be interested in contacting him if possible, but all my efforts so far have lead to nothing.