Some ports age like fine wine. Others age like an open can of pop left on the windowsill. For nearly four decades, Ocean Software’s ZX Spectrum conversion of Wizball sat firmly in the second camp — everybody knows the Commodore 64 version is the one worth playing, and Speccy owners were left wondering where all the good stuff went.
Not anymore. Homebrewer Leigh “Gravious” Ashton has just released Wizball: Enhanced Edition for the ZX Spectrum 128K, an unofficial fan modification that drags the 1987 port kicking and screaming up to the standard of its C64 sibling. And here’s the best part: he didn’t do it alone — Mark R. Jones, one of the original Ocean graphics artists, came back to help. The guy who drew it in 1987 has now spent his spare time fixing it in 2026. That’s the kind of full-circle redemption arc the retro scene was made for.
According to the full changelog on Ashton’s itch.io page, the headline additions are all the C64 goodies the Spectrum missed out on: colour-cycling enemy bullets, Purple Blazor power-up shots, the C64 font, two adapted instruction pages, a clear “Enemies Remaining” count, and — at long last — a proper top-ten high-score table.
But this isn’t just a feature transplant. As Sprite Fountain reports, Ashton has reworked the fundamentals: circular collision detection replaces the original’s famously dodgy hitboxes, enemy collision boxes are smaller (fewer cheap deaths!), and enemies and upgrade pearls no longer vanish when the screen gets busy. Catelite got some love too — his automatic pull toward Wizball is halved while you’re controlling him, and the left-right power-up gesture has a more forgiving timing window, starting in either direction.
Presentation-wise it’s a different game: a new double-buffered renderer kills the sprite flicker and tearing, there’s a dual parallax starfield, full-colour menus, an attract sequence cycling title, credits and high scores, and an in-game music jukebox. Handy, that.
What it doesn’t have: the Cops and the Bonus Level stayed behind on the C64. Ashton is upfront about it — fitting them in would need a much bigger reorganisation of the code and assets, and the 128K’s memory is fully spoken for. Honest work knows its limits, and I’ll take that over a half-baked addition any day.
And per The Daily Game News, Ashton explicitly states no generative AI was used in making the Enhanced Edition. In this week’s climate, that’s worth saying twice. One caveat from that same report: the price hasn’t been stated on the announcement — homebrew releases like this are sometimes free, sometimes paid, so check the itch.io page before diving in.
You can run it in emulators like Fuse or Spectaculator, or on real hardware with a DivMMC or Retro Games’ The Spectrum.
Ocean shipped the original back in 1987. Thirty-nine years later, its weakest port finally got the version it always deserved — with the original artist’s blessing. So I’ll ask: which Spectrum classic needs this treatment next? I’m taking bets.
Sources: Sprite Fountain — The Daily Game News — itch.io: download + full changelog