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Star Castle Arcade - Beta Release


Thomas Jentzsch

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icon_idea.gif The rings only repair when you kill the last segment of the outer ring (see manual, page 4). Then the middle ring is moved to the outer ring, the inner ring to the middle ring and a new inner ring is created.

 

So keep at least one segment of the outer ring intact. Then you can create big holes in the inner and middle rings and kill the gun.

 

BTW: The arcade version is even harder. Especially the difficulty ramp up is very fast and the game becomes extremely hard very soon.

Edited by Thomas Jentzsch
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This is one of the hardest games I have ever played.

At first I got so frustrated, that I wanted to throw the Atari through the window :D

But then I watched some gameplay from the arcade version, and noticed the bouncing trick.

I have gotten to the third castle, but that's as far as I get.

 

As soon as I make a hole in the inner ring, and try to fly behind him, it either repairs itself, or I hit a missile :skull:

Is there a way to keep the rings from repairing themselves, or am I just to damn slow?

Kinda wish there was a VERY easy mode as well. Got my switches at B position, but it's still brutal :D

 

Impressive game :thumbsup:

YEah it's tough as nails. Just getting past the first castle is rewarding. More often than not I become a sitting duck. A lot of times my shot defeating the Star Castle comes as it takes out my ship with a plasma ball. You do still advance to the next round even if you lose a ship taking out the Star Castle.

 

Somebody told me the trick is to slid my ship sideways and take a shot as the window opens. The plasma ball will narrowly miss the ship if you are side-stepping, but easier said than done.

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  • 1 year later...

I've played this in emulation many times. I just bought the cartridge.

 

When I played the cart on my light sixer, instead of bounce off the rings, I blow up. Is this a difficulty setting I am unaware of?

 

Darryl

It appears my six switcher is stuck on hard difficulty. Time to take it apart and get out the multi-meter.

 

Darryl

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I just played this for the 1st time. I haven't played the arcade game in probably 40+ years but this seems harder than the arcade version was. Still very cool game:)

Edited by bigfriendly
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1 hour ago, TurboWesties said:

Has anyone else had trouble running this on the 7800GD?

@SainT can verify; however, it appears support for the scheme it leverages - FA2 - is not present. 

 

Per documentation for the FA2 scheme Star Castle utilizes:

Quote

This is an extended version of the CBS RAM Plus bankswitching scheme
supported by the Harmony cartridge.

 

There are six (or seven) 4K banks, accessible by read/write to $1FF5 -
$1FFA (or $1FFB), and 256 bytes of RAM.

 

The 256 bytes of RAM can be loaded/saved to Harmony cart flash by
accessing $1FF4 (see ramReadWrite() for more information), which is
emulated by storing in a file.

 

RAM read port is $1100 - $11FF, write port is $1000 - $10FF.

 

For 29K versions of the scheme, the first 1K is ARM code (implements
actual bankswitching on the Harmony cart), which is completely ignored
by the emulator.  Also supported is a 32K variant.  In any event, only
data at 1K - 29K of the ROM is used.

 

  @author  Chris D. Walton, Thomas Jentzsch

The publicly available ROM shows as 28K. 

 

If Star Castle is indeed not using any ARM code, as it is not 29K, there may be a chance a future firmware update to the 7800GD may include support.

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6 minutes ago, Trebor said:

If Star Castle is indeed not using any ARM code, as it is not 29K, there may be a chance a future firmware update to the 7800GD may include support.

Star Castle is written in 100% 6507 assembler. The ARM is only used for bankswitching and high scores saving/loading.

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4 minutes ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

Star Castle is written in 100% 6507 assembler. The ARM is only used for bankswitching and high scores saving/loading.

Thanks for confirming.  Unfortunately, even with Star Castle only using the ARM for bankswitching and high score saving/loading, that may be the showstopper for 7800GD.

However, @SainT would know for certain.

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2 minutes ago, Trebor said:

Thanks for confirming.  Unfortunately, even with Star Castle only using the ARM for bankswitching and high score saving/loading, that may be the showstopper for 7800GD.

However, @SainT would know for certain.

It looks like he’s going to look into it (fingers crossed)

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Yep, was having a dig into this last night! It is using a mapper I don't support currently, but it isn't using any custom ARM code, so it could be supported. It's something I'd like to have a look at, but my biggest enemy at the moment is both FPGA and MCU memory space.

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