Overview
This page will host any oddities that I find in ZX Spectrum games, whilst I’m browsing their content with tools such as ZX Preview.
I also use ZX Block Editor (by the same coder as ZX Preview) to extract saved arrays/binary files when I’ve got a shedload of text or lots of arrays to extract.
The block of data is then edited in either Notepad++ or WinHex (my favourite hex editor). See my tip below on how I remove all the non-ASCII characters first.
ZX Preview is part of the ZX Modules and I host a copy of them here (via my Dropbox) as the original developer stopped updating them.
All the stuff I find is either sent to Gerard Sweeney The Tipshop, or he has done some of the work himself. No need to re-submit it.
Cheats Found
Boxing Coach by Alfo Software (1989)
I think this cheat routine is very subtle. Unless you were in the know (or had hacked the game), it wasn’t going to jump out and shout it from the rooftops.
8 INPUT PLEASE ENTER NAME";N$
9 IF LEN N$>10 THEN GOTO 8
10 IF N$="ABCDEFZY" THEN MONEY=MONEY+99999999
The daft thing is that I was actually looking for “The Boxer” by Cult Software and looked inside this game’s .TAP file by accident!
Questions and Answers from Quiz-type games
The following table will show you all of the ZX Spectrum games that I’ve been perusing in order to extract all of the questions and answers from. I didn’t include the stuff from Party Quiz above though as these are proper quiz games.
Some of the downloads are plain text, others are Excel spreadsheets and occasionally a PDF output of it as well. I use whichever is easiest for me to re-format the data once it’s extracted.
Note: Some of the questions/answers are a “bit dated” either due to their subject matter, such as:
- a smattering of ex-TV stars and singers who are now known these days for ‘other things’ that they were doing in the shadows back then … *cough* Jimmy, Gary and Rolf *cough* …
- old currencies no longer in use, especially in European countries
- the names that things were called back in the early 80s, e.g. Mohammedian instead of Muslim
- countries that were together (e.g. Yugoslavia) and now apart .. and vice versa (West & East Germany).
What’s been done so far
| Game (inc. URL) | Extract data Download | Source? | Notes | Done? | |
| 01 | Pop Quizz (R.D. Foord,1985) | Download | BASIC | It was easy to extract and re-format from the code. | Jan 2024 |
| 02 | The Blandford Family Quiz Book (1984) | Download | BASIC | Data came out easily enough. | Jan 2024 |
| 03 | BBC Mastermind (Mirrorsoft, 1984) | Download | Array(s) | Questions were spread out in text arrays across both sides of the tape. Extracted and reformatted in an Excel spreadsheet. Watch out for some really bad spelling! | Jan 2024 |
| 04 | Blockbusters (1984) | Download | Array(s) | ASCII extract from the text arrays stored on tape. | Jan 2024 |
| 05 | Blockbusters Question Master (1985) | Download | Array(s) | ASCII extract from the text arrays stored on tape. | Jan 2024 |
| 06 | Breakpoint (Airline Software, 1989) | Download | BASIC | Extracted questions and all possible sets of answers, with the correct answer listed in final column. Download contains Excel and PDF versions of the info. (Also found a bug in the question set as one had 5 answers, instead of 4). | Jan 2024 |
| 07 | CashCade (Fastback UK, 1990) | Download | BASIC | Arrays were stored in the BASIC program, so a simple text extract and rejigging into an Excel file. | Feb 2024 |
| 08 | Party Quiz (1986) | Download | BASIC | A typical 80’s rude quiz. Definitely aimed at Viz readers et al! No-one admitted to coding it! All questions were stored in the BASIC listing. | Feb 2024 |
| 09 | Hi Q Quiz (Blue Ribbon,1989) | Download | BASIC | All stored within program. Quite a few spelling mistakes (highlighted in PDF & Excel). | Feb 2024 |
| 10 | Micro IQ (M.K.Circuits,1983) | Download | BASIC | 9 separate programs on tape, each with a set of questions and answers stored within the code. | Feb 2024 |
| 11 | Hotline Quiz (Chalksoft) | Download | Arrays | Each set of questions (there are 9) consist of three separate arrays stored on side B. Laid out as Questions, then all four Multiple Choice answers, then the correct Answers. I’ve included a snapshot of the game at the loading prompt so you don’t have to suffer the intro. But turn the volume down – especially if you win :) One (!!) question in Medley #1 uses the Spectrum’s Extended Graphics to display a code that you need to break! | March 2024 |
| 12 | The Ultimate Soccer Quiz (Marksman,1985) | Download | BASIC | I know next to nothing about football, so exporting the two arrays from BASIC into Notepad++ and then trying to align them both, took some time. Excel and PDF versions included. | March 2024 |
| 13 | Stuart Henry’s Pop Quiz (Bellflower,1984) | Download | BASIC | This was a big lot of data to extract. All stored in DATA statements which were fiddly to extract into Excel easily. There are 54 separate question types with 14 questions inside each, giving 756 different questions overall. I had to look up who he was, as it wasn’t someone I knew from when I was 14. He was a Scottish Radio DJ when this game was created. Unfortunately he passed away at 53 due to multiple sclerosis. | March 2024 |
| 14 | Micro Trivia (Harold Gale,1987) | Download | Arrays | Two arrays. One used to hold the majority of the question text and a code to denote which one it was. The main bulk of the questions and the 4 x multiple choice answers were stored in the other array. The Excel/PDF version highlights the correct answer, but in the original array, this was denoted with an asterisk. | March 2024 |
| 15 | Birds (Chalksoft,1984) | Download | BASIC | All Questions & Answers from two of the games on this tape, plus a quick password hack for another game. | March 2024 |
| 16 | Super Quiz 1, 2 & 3 | Download | BASIC | All three Bible quizzes released by the same firm and all coded by the same person. They were all written in BASIC. I had some odd Bing searches when looking for the answers that I wasn’t sure of, but in the end (esp. for SuperQuiz 2) the coder decided to make the first answer of the three multiple choice options to be the correct one – over 100 times! The same data for SuperQuiz 2 is also used in SuperQuiz 3. | March 2024 |
| 17 | Christmas Quiz | Download | BASIC | A rip by Gerard Sweeney of The Tipshop. This game was included on Issue #25 of the 16/48 tape magazine. | March 2024 |
| 18 | General Knowledge Quiz (Chezron) | Download | BASIC | Another rip by Gerard Sweeney of The Tipshop. This time it’s a quiz that appeared on Outlet Magazine #64. | March 2024 |
| 19 | Micro-De-Bug Consultancy (UK) Educational Quizzes | Download | BASIC | This company released a few educational quiz games and Gerard’s done them all. Each game was in a separate sheet, so I’ve merged them all into a single one. Includes: Biology O-Level & CSE, Knowledge Quiz 9-99 Years, Reasoning 11+ and Science 12-14 quizzes by Micro-De-Bug Constultancy. I did the Knowledge Quiz myself and was shocked by the awful spelling, but then I’m a pedant and a technical author by trade :) | March 2024 |
| 20 | All of Clever Clogs games | Download will be available when I remember to finish off the Excel file! It’s been bugging me since April 2024! | Arrays | This collection was a nightmare to extract, catalogue, tidy up all of the text, then import it into a single Excel spreadsheet (with multiple sheets). Some games had 1 set of questions whilst others had 6 sets … I got there in the end. Not helped as some questions used the ZX Spectrum’s extended character set in them. | April 2024 |
| 21 | Play Your Cards Right | Download | Binary file | Questions were stored in a binary file with extra bits of junk, but mostly plain ASCII so easy to rip. However, I’ve been unable to find the answers – not that there are answers, just a base number that you guess above or below. No apologies for the late-1970s / early 1980s attitude of the questions. I didn’t write them :) | July 2024 |
| 22 | Telly Trivia (Outlet Magazine) | Download | BASIC | Stored in the BASIC listing, so I cut them out, re-arranged them into a CSV file and imported it into Excel file to make it look neater. | July 2024 |
| 23 | Bob’s Full House | Download | Binary files | All question & answer data was stored in the eight separate binary files in the .TAP file. | July 2024 |
| 24 | Highway (Chezron) | Download | BASIC | A rip by Gerard Sweeney (The Tipshop). This game was included in Issue #46 of the Chezron disk magazine. | August 2024 |
| 25 | Tycoon – The Crossword Business Game | Download | BASIC & compiled BASIC! | A pain-in-the-arse rip to do. No arrays, but text hidden inside a compiled BASIC (MCoder III) that was called by a BASIC outer-shell. Plus there was a bug where you can’t enter puzzle numbers 5 through to 9 for some reason. I’ve looked at the BASIC code and I can’t see why this is happening as it checks for any value between 1 and 49! | Xmas 2024 |
| 26 | Crossword Puzzler & 20 Crossword Puzzles (add-on) | Download | BASIC & Arrays (lots of them) | This hack wouldn’t have been possible without some help from Ian (aka SToS on Atari Forum) who created some Python scripts that converted the arrays used by the game into legible text. Each set of questions were stored in four separate arrays on tape! The PDF contains all of the puzzles that came with the original game as well as the 20 puzzle add-on pack. | NYE 2024 & NYD 2025 |
| 27 | Sinclair Tower | Download | Raw ASCII rip to Excel/PDF | A game I first saw on Bapstarcade’s Twitch stream. Whilst everyone was watching Bret make a hash of the game, I was busy ripping out the questions and answers. There’s still one question that I need the answer (and the correct one) for “double load”, so I’ll update this download once I’ve found it. | November 2025 |
| 28 | The Scholar (Normal & Xmas Editions) | Download | Raw ASCII of .NEX file to Word, then into a PDF | OK, so this is for the ZX Spectrum Next, but it’s still a Spectrum-ish game, so it belongs on this page :) Watch out for some of the spelling mistakes, e.g. ZEPPLIN and KITCHIN. Although KITCHIN isn’t used in an answer, unlike ZEPPLIN. The developer fixed one (CALVARY) in the Xmas one on 23rd Dec. Game found whilst watching Bapstarcade’s Twitch stream. | Xmas 2025 |
| 29 | Dr Jim’s ZXMas 2025 Quiz | Coming soon… | Arrays into text, then prettied up in Excel / PDF | Game found whilst browsing Spectrum Computing’s New Releases section, so I had to just rip it out. Lots of questions in the arrays (x14), but with Ian’s ZX Array Python script, they were easily converted to text files, which then needed a bit of work to make sure they were the correct content. | January 2026 … |
| 30 | Arcade Trivia Quiz | Coming soon… | Exported MS DOS files into Excel. Needs converting to a PDF. | The answers were extracted, as multiple choices, but no key was found to determine the correct ones. Until someone else (Ian aka SToS) pointed out that the first answer was always the correct one! Excel sheet created, just need to tart it up before added it to the list. | January 2026 … |
Working on the following …
- The Quiz (Alligata) – this was originally on our “could not extract” list. But, as with Arcade Trivia Quiz, Ian (aka SToS) pointed out that the first answer was always the correct one. This one is waiting for some time to create the Excel spreadsheet and then the PDF.
- QuizTron 48000 series. Multi-part quiz game, but like Mike Read’s Pop Quiz, uses some kind of dictionary compression to save memory. Jan 2026 update: I didn’t use Google enough as it turns out the full source code and questions/answers in a plain text format (but not CSV) are on GitHub. D’oh! I’ll add this to my queue of items to do.
- Mike Read’s Pop Quiz: After a few years of this title sitting in the ‘couldn’t extract’ pile, a coder on the Atari ST (Ian aka SToS) has broken the format of question & answer data files (via the data files from the MS DOS version) and sorted out some 68K / C code to export all the questions and answers. I hope to (finally) upload these files soon.
- Wender Bender – There’s a built-in set and extra question set on the original TAP and another on a separate TAP. This uses a dictionary replacement to compress repeated words into a specific byte outside of the Upper Case alphabet in a Spectrum ASCII range. Having to search and work out what the word replacements are before being able to rebuild the questions. Then work out how the answer files are encrypted as no ASCII text is visible in the game memory or the data files. Ian (aka SToS) to rescue and, I quote: “The main program is XOR encrypted with 0x61 and the answer arrays are XOR encrypted with 0x5F,” He’s supplied some Python scripts to help me decrypt them into plain ASCII, then port them into Excel then prettier looking PDF. Coming soon!
- SoccerQ (Crash) – minor tweaks to double-check data now that it’s in Excel. After a lot of help from “Spectrum For Everyone” group on Facebook, all but one of the questions now has the correct answer as they weren’t easily marked in the datasets.
- The Triple Crown Quiz (Sport & Racing,1985) – all ripped. Just needs arranging in Excel and then to generate a PDF. Who knew that a quiz on ancient horse races and their winners would be soooo exciting :)
- Superquiz – appeared twice on a football compilation, but with two separate sets of questions. I’m wading through the BASIC listing and extracting the text. Not the same thing as the bible-based Superquiz game which has already been done.
- Quazer – horrible multiple-choice game in BASIC that needs some proper debugging before being able to extract all possible questions & answers. Not helping is that it was a 16K release, so there’s four separate programs to wade through.
Ones that we couldn’t extract
There were a few that I (and Gerard Sweeney of The Tipshop) attempted but either couldn’t rip the data out due to encryption, lack of answers (or even just the correct answer) and/or dictionary compression (*) used. A lot of these I’ve now moved into the “To Do” area.
(*) Where certain words were replaced by a single (usually non-ASCII) byte to save memory. Unless you know what each byte represents, you’re on a hiding to nothing.
My thanks to Ian (aka SToS) from the Atari Forum website for all of his help in enabling me to extract a lot of the games that were languishing in this “can’t be done” pile. Some of them have been in here for a few years, but not for much longer :)
Treasure Hunt by MacMillan
Based on the TV show, this one is a pain. Unless you have the book that came with the game, you’ll be completely stuck. I only managed to extract the first set of correct answers because I found them online. There is no solution available anywhere that would help me complete this one.
I’m sure that there are others out there that are a PITA to extract from and they will be added to the list in due course ….
How arrays are stored in game files
Removing non-ASCII characters (via Notepad++/RegEx)
This may seem like an obvious fix, but I wasn’t aware of the full power of using RegEx parameters in Notepad++, even though I’ve been using it for a loooong time.
If you open up an array that you’ve extracted from a ZX Spectrum .TAP/.TZX file, you will notice a lot of non-ASCII characters appearing. These are the extra bits that the ZX Spectrum ROM had embedded in the file to denote the end of an array value and other bits and pieces. AKA there’s probably a better explanation out there about what these byte values mean, but I didn’t bother Googling for it!
Removing characters before the usual alphabet
You can remove them all in one quick search and replace by using the RegEx parameter of [\x00-\x1F]+ – these are the hex values for 00 to 31.
Make sure you select the Regular expression option before clicking the Replace All button.
This doesn’t rearrange all of the text you’ve extracted into a neat list, that’s still down to you. But it will leave behind all the normal ASCII characters, which makes editing them a lot, lot easier.
For characters after the normal alphabet
You can do this one first and then do a similar search and replace for all characters above, e.g after the letter ‘z’ which is 7A in Hex. To strip off all chars from 7B through to FF, use this parameter like you do the one above [\x7B-\xFF]+
Note:
With some games, e.g. Wender Bender, it uses these non-ASCII characters to renote a word-replacement compression. Doing the above search and replace will completely ruin your data extract and you will have to start all over again!