HSC Season 5 Week 23: Carnival

[Mister VCS]

56,630

 

thanks to my 64 in one cartridge...

Edited February 17, 2008 by Mister VCS

[aftermac]

Just went to stella.sourceforge.net and 2.4.2, which I'm running, is still the latest version. If Stella has a built-in method of capturing screenshots, I haven't been using it. I use Apple's command-shift-3 screenshot command. Thanks!

You just have to press 'F12' to take a snapshot in Stella.

That's right, but I just noticed you're using a Mac. On that system, F12 is mapped to Expose or something, I think. In that case, you can remap the snapshot functionality to another key (within Stella).

 

Not only Expose, but on my iBook F-12 is also the eject button for my CD drive.

[Kurt_Woloch]

And right after the second rollover things get really hairy, your ammo decreases automatically even if you don't shoot!!!

 

Now that's odd... that the game would get harder after the 2nd rollover, instead of staying the way it was for so many rounds...

 

I tried the arcade version in MAME32 for a comparison, and there the ramping up of difficulty definitly doesn't stop with the 4th wave... what happens there is that a higher and higher percentage of things you have to shoot are ducks, so right at the start of the wave you get attacked by multiple ducks, and you have a hard time shooting them all. Then fresh ducks keep coming out at a faster and faster rate.

 

All in all, I'd say this is one of the games which earned Coleco the reputation of intentionally crippling their games for other systems. While the graphics look pretty good, some game elements are definitely missing which should have been rather easy to do, most notably the music and the bear intermissions. They just should have used more than 4K of ROM (hey, their Colecovision games were also 16K, so why try to save money here?). Pretty much the same thing with "Donkey Kong"...

 

I think an interesting homebrew project could be to do a better version of the game improving on those shortcomings (maybe building on the given codebase).

[Captain Beard]

And right after the second rollover things get really hairy, your ammo decreases automatically even if you don't shoot!!!

 

Now that's odd... that the game would get harder after the 2nd rollover, instead of staying the way it was for so many rounds...

I never noticed this ramp up when I scored my 500k+ game, but then, I don't pay much attention to my bullet counter -- too busy shooting out those pipes!

 

I also never noticed the "pseudo-two player mode" described by Gemini, although at the end of the game, it did flash a Player One and a Player Two score. The Player Two score, however, was 0.

Edited February 18, 2008 by Captain Beard

[Impaler_26]

I think an interesting homebrew project could be to do a better version of the game improving on those shortcomings (maybe building on the given codebase).

Yep, i agree! Nukey Shay already started an extended hack of Carnival, i'd like to see that one finished!

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?s...amp;hl=carnival

Edited February 18, 2008 by Impaler_26

[Impaler_26]

Yeah! I finally got the hang of this game! I hope i can roll it before the deadline.

 

92,040.

[Ze_ro]

I took a peek into the code... SWCHB gets read two times... once bit 0 only gets used, and once bit 1 only gets used. Which means that only the SELECT and RESET switches get polled. The COLOR / B/W and DIFFICULTY switches have no effect.

Ah, I figured as much. Thanks for looking into this!

 

Ha! Nice one... Once again, I fail at cut 'n paste... I actually noticed this mistake when I copied my Carnival entry to make the Megamania entry

 

Looks like this is kind of a quick week. I never much cared for this game... even the better ColecoVision version seemed boring to me. Certainly not one of Coleco's better games.

 

--Zero

[Impaler_26]

Ok, so i couldn't roll the score!

But i had more fun with this game than i expected and scored higher than i thought...

So this was a great week for me!