Old Imagine Games Fixed

It's amazing that fixes are still being found for ancient Spectrum games. Take two classic Imagine games for example, Arcadia and Ah Diddums, released in 1982 and 1983 respectively.

Both of these games suffered from a mysterious problem that caused the player ship (or teddy bear) to randomly move on its own, and in the case of Arcadia, fire on its own too.

This could sometimes cause you to destroy the last alien when you wanted to leave so you could get onto the next level.

Now, thanks to Lee Tonks over on the World Of Spectrum forums, both of these games can now be played as they were meant to.

Entering the following pokes will correct the problem.

Arcadia	29236,62 29237,255
Ah Diddums	29568,62 29569,255

For anyone interested, the issue was around the fact that games are looking for input from a Fuller joystick, and as none are connected, the random movement occurs. Obviously this doesn't happen if you do have a Fuller joystick, or you have set your emulator is use one.

It seems the developers didn't try the games without the joystick - or maybe they did, but couldn't fix the problem.

A big thanks to Lee for fixing these games. Although old now, both games are still enjoyable to play.

I covered the full set of Imagine games in Episode 20 of the show.