The Castle/Castle Excellent on famicom

[sleepingkirby]

I was born in Taiwan (this is actually an important point.) and when I was little, my father got us a famicom (yep, not nintendo, a famicom. With mic and all.). So I played a lot of "nintendo" games before I came to the US. There's a game, that until just now (it's been 20 years+,I must have been around 4~6 years old.), I found out was called "The Castle" that I use to play on the famicom. Now, for those that know the series, they're asking themselves "Wait, don't you mean Castle Excellent?". And hence my dilemma. In my 20 years of looking for this game, I finally found the title, but also found the NES/Famicom version to be nothing like what I what I remembered. The Castle for the MSX, however, is exactly like I remember... but I've never seen a MSX machine in my life.

So I'm humbly asking all of you who had more history and experience than I, if you have any info how this is possible, please post a reply. My theory so far is that... well... I lived in Taiwan, the country known for (besides it's occasional brushes with China) hackers and pirates, and that somehow, my father got a port/emulated version of the original "The Castle" game.

Thanks in advance.

[Cornellius]

Unfortunatly, ebay is now the place to go for old games and hardware. Maybe it's worth a try ? I cannot point you to any specific location of that said game (not only I don't know where to find it, but asking for roms is also against the rules here), but emule is said to have the highest members and files, might want to try that too. I don't even know the original game, so I can't help you more than that, sorry.

[D--]

The game you are looking for, if it was on NES, is Castlequest. One word. Not to be confused with Castle Quest--an entirely different game. The rooms are slightly different, but the gameplay and everything else is basically the same as the prequel.

The Castle was only on MSX, unless someone made a hack of Castle Excellent to put in the maps from The Castle, I'm not sure how else you would have played that one without an MSX. Granted, it's possible. There are still hundreds of cartridges from the Chinese mainland and Taiwan that have yet to be dumped.

It's very rare to see original programming in pirate games that continue a series. Generally the pirates just hijack the engine and redo the level/graphics. MSX emulation on a NES is also out of the question. If that were possible, someone would have already ported Penguin Adventure. Do you remember the Chinese name of the game? I could always poke around on baidu and see if anyone has information on it. It looks like both The Castle and Castle Excellent are called 精致之城.

Are you sure it wasn't SMS? The Castle is available on that system.