Just to clarify: By "free" 100 points, I meant the 100 points I got on games like blockade, comotion, dominos, and several bowling games.(posted 9603 days ago)As for autofire, I used the autofire my joystick has (and not a good one at that; I think there are joysticks that have much faster autofire than mine (Interact PC Arcade)). RLH was something I considered a cheat, but when looking at some recordings, I thought autofire wasn't. If I really wanted to cheat, I probably easily could. I am a programmer, and I could probably make my own custom version of MAME that would allow me to use some virtually undetectable cheats. Or, probably with a lot of work, I could probably doctor up an inp file that would never let me die. Reminds me of when I was playing DOOM, and there were was a website that had some categories in which people could earn titles. Two titles included creating illegal recordings (either using some program or editing recordings by hand). As far as I know, nobody ever claimed any of those titles. But I am digressing...
As for the differences between CK and DK, I grew up in Europe, and I have never seen any DK games there. Everywhere, they had CK games. Or, more precisely, some were *called* DK, but they shared the characteristics of MAME's CK versions. Which is another reason I don't like to take one version and call it the original version. In the case of DK, the original would probably become the US version of DK, simply because the majority of the players on MARP are from the US.
Anyway, I think the difference between the US version of DK and all other versions of DK and CK is clear: It's the strange (and IMHO illogical) order of the stages (25m, 50m, 75m, ...) in the US version. The Japanese version of DK has the "correct" order of the stages like all CK versions, but shares most of its other characteristics with the US version.
Differences between CK and DK:
- The bouncing girders screen (75m) is different. There is definitely a different rhythm to how they bounce; on CK versions, on L=04 and higher, they come in pairs, on DK versions, they always come singly.
- On the 25m on DK, one cannot "fall through the floor" to complete the level; on CK one can.
- On CK versions, on the 50m, only 1 or 2 fireballs appear at the start; on DK versions, I think it goes up to 5 fireballs.
- On CK versions, there is an "end" to the game; the time on L=22 (or L=12 on the CK version on Scramble hardware) is extremely limited; the bonus counter starts out at 100, then changes to 4000 (instead of the usual 8000 at L=04 and higher), and when it has counted down from 4000 to 3600, one dies. The 25m, 50m, and 75m stages can still be finished within this amount of time, but the 100m is impossible, even if there were no fireballs. When I found this out (after having spent a lot of money on the game to get to this skill) 17 years ago or so, I spent a lot more money trying to find secret exits (like the 25m "jumping through the floor") on the 100m, but I never found one. I did find one on the 50m, but in the 100s of times I have played the game (and so probably 1000s of times I have seen the 50m), I have seen exit show up only a handful of times. On very rare occasions, below the handbag (is that what it is) on the bottom level of the 50m, a hole appears; inside this hole, there is a "Mario", just like the ones that are shown in the top left corner indicating how many lives you have left. Whenever that happens (so almost never), you can just fall through that hole and you'll have finished the 50m. Anyway, since the 100m was impossible, I then started to get as many points as possible. On one or two occasions, I actually managed to reach L=21, 25m on my first life, then I gathered as many points as possible on that stage before the time ran out (so I died on purpose), then did the same with all but one of my remaining lives, and used that last life to finally die on the impossible L=22, 100m. My personal best this way was 654300 points. Anyway, as far as I know, DK does not have an impossible stage.
But I guess the main reason I like CK so much more is because that was the game I fell in love with. Everything else I have seen since then (including home computer versions) has too many subtle differences, so it felt like those versions weren't the "real" version. If the US version of DK had been the first version I encountered, then I probably would have felt that CK wasn't "real".
Hmm... I really should start to cut down on the lengths of my posts.
Cheers, Ben Jos.