Magpie

One for sorrow. Two for joy.

You are Mr Magpie, a robot magpie in a robot breaker's yard, and Mrs Magpie is in pieces somewhere in it.

Thirty screens of scrap, pipework and machinery. Gravity pulls at you the

whole time — you feather the thrust to hover, and pick your moment. Shoot

the machines. Everything you break drops salvage, and salvage falls, so

you go and catch it before it fades. Land on a green pad to bank what you

are carrying. Bank enough and you earn another bird.

Six pieces of Mrs Magpie are hidden in the yards, one to a screen. Find

all six and she comes with you for the rest of the run — flying your own

path twelve beats behind you, firing when you fire, and doubling

everything you bank.

Written from scratch in Z80 assembly for a 48K Spectrum. One load, no

turbo loader. It runs on real hardware or in a ZX Spectrum emulator.

What is in it

• Thirty screens, with exits in all four directions — it is a map, not a corridor.
• Four special weapons: a lobbed bomb, a bouncing bomb, a homing seeker and a shield. Ammo crates refill whichever one you are holding, so what you carry is a real decision.
• Mrs Magpie, once you have all six of her.
• Three difficulty levels, each paying better than the last, all on one score table.
• A score table with name entry, and an attract mode that plays itself.
• One or two players, taking turns.
• Redefinable keys and Kempston joystick.
• Its own tape loader, which paints the poster and runs a progress bar across it in the game's own colours.

The rules the game keeps

Most of these are checked automatically every time the game is built, so

they are promises rather than intentions:

• Red kills. Everything that can kill you is red, and nothing red is safe to touch. Checked screen by screen, cell by cell.
• Nothing is hidden, and nowhere is walled off. A simulated bird is flown from every doorway of all thirty screens: every crate, every piece of salvage and every piece of Mrs Magpie has to be somewhere it can actually get to — and so does every open part of every room.
• Nothing kills you the moment you arrive. Nothing that moves is allowed within twenty-four pixels of clear air of a doorway.

Every gun wakes up visibly before it fires. You restart on the screen you died on, with your score.

Controls

Z / X left and right

M thrust

SPACE fire — tap for the cannon, hold for your special weapon

B next weapon

P / Q / R pause / quit to title / start again

All five play keys can be changed — pick CONTROLS on the title screen and

press K. Kempston joystick can be switched on there too. It is off until

you turn it on, because a 48K with no interface fitted reads that port as

noise.

Loading it

Download `magpie.tap` and open it in any ZX Spectrum emulator — Fuse

is free and runs on Windows, macOS and Linux. Load the tape, type

    LOAD ""

and start it. The tape autostarts and does the rest. It takes about two

and a half minutes at real speed, with the poster painting itself as it

goes; most emulators have a fast-load or "tape trap" option if you would

rather not wait.

For real hardware or a tape duplicator, `magpie.tzx` is the master — six

standard-speed blocks, ordinary ROM timing throughout.

What you get

`magpie.tap` — the game, one load, 37 KB.

`magpie.tzx` — the same tape as a master, if you want it on a real cassette.

The inlay copy, so you can print a case for it.

Notes on what is in the blocks and the memory it wants, for anyone who likes knowing.

Made by

Mark Wright, 2026. Code, graphics, level design and music.

Music and sound effects made with Renata — renatachiptune.com — my own chip-music tool. Two voices on the 48K beeper: the title tune and every effect are the same one-bit speaker doing all of it.

Built with sjasmplus, Python, SkoolKit and z88dk-ticks. No third-party

engine, framework or game library, and nothing in it is derived from any

commercial Spectrum title.

The thirty screens are packed with ZX0 by Einar Saukas, whose 69-byte

decompressor unpacks them on the Spectrum — the one piece of code on the

tape that is not mine.