Format: SPECTRUM 48K

Author: Nigel Alderton

Year of Release: 1983

Publishing Label: A&F

Default Keys: Up Q   Down A   Left O   Right P   Jump M or 1

Joystick Supported: No

Cheats or POKEs: None known

Known Bugs:

Various reports of occasional strange behaviour resulting from Hen House Harry jumping into the bottom left corner of level 2 describe Harry falling through the floor to his death at the bottom of the screen, walking through the wall and re-appearing on the right-hand side of the screen or even completely exploding. If anyone can reproduce this with screenshots, we'd love to see!

Sources: World of Spectrum: Games forum - Chuckie Egg topic
Stephen Smith's Spectrum Software Database: Chuckie Egg (instructions)

Emulator: MESS - ZX Spectrum driver

BIOS images required:

ZX Spectrum driver: spectrum.zip [CRC32 #80E21DF4]

Emulator Platform-Specific Usage Instructions:

Install MESS and The Chuckie Egg Professional's Resource Kit.

Load the Chuckie Egg (1983)(A & F Software).z80 memory snapshot from the Resource Kit into the MESS ZX Spectrum driver. Chuckie Egg will start instantaneously.

Notes: A Chuckie Egg level designer from P & M software for this release is also provided in the Resource Kit. Information on the differences between this and the BBC 32K release are outlined in the FAQ. The death tune was also used by MegaDodo's "Pheenix", although that played the tune in attract mode; it went on for longer too.

Review: Attributed by many to be the very first release of Chuckie Egg, this version was programmed by Nigel Alderton who is generally considered the originator of the Chuckie Egg design. It's working title was Eggy Kong before it was published by A&F. Nigel has since revealed there were many more features he originally wanted to include but couldn't due to time constraints. For more information, read the History page of this site.

Colourful graphics which, although adequate, suffer from the infamous Spectrum colour clashes when Harry or the birds climb or walk through ladders, eggs or seed. The sprites look ok and move well, though debatably not as quickly or as fluidly as the BBC 32K version, and the sound effects do the job. Arguably, the original - everything else was measured against this one.