ADG Episode 43 - Magic Carpet

Channel:

Pixelmusement

Subscribers:

22,800

Published on September 24, 2013 3:56:19 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZT-S2F191I

Game:

Magic Carpet (1994)

Category:

Show

Duration: 21:01

22,624 views

463

Episode Originally Released: April 23rd, 2011

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It kinda sucks that the Magic Carpet games have been long since forgotten. Both the original game and the sequel are extremely fun, have a lot of stuff to do, numerous spells to cast, and have a well defined difficulty curve. Unfortunately, due to being rushed to store shelves, they also happen to be extremely glitchy and love to crash. (Though Magic Carpet Plus doesn't crash anywhere near as often as the original game or the sequel.)

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Additional Information and Corrections:

* Magic Carpet is now available from the Good Old Games website for $6 as a digital download. Follow this link if you wish to get it: http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/magic_carpet/?pp=91dfde1d6e005e422f64a59776234f1f4c80b5e4

* The Earthquake and Crater spells actually work on airborne enemies too, which is something I frequently forget about.

* I've never actually played this game multiplayer, so I don't actually know how good I would be against a living opponent. Same with the sequel too. Just another reason why a modern sequel/remake would be awesome.

* The video compression kinda makes the random dot stereogram mode impossible to view in this episode, but trust me, it DOES work when you're actually playing!

* As you might've noticed, the speed is not constant throughout the game. The faster your system and the less stuff is happening on-screen, the faster the game goes. Thankfully, the sequel, Magic Carpet 2, is frame limited and thus can't go too fast. (But it can slow down.)

* In order to run the game with SVGA graphics you needed at least 16 MB of RAM, which is the default setting in DOSBox. Sometimes it's a good idea to bump this up to 24 just to be on the safe side. I've found that 24 is usually a much better number to use with DOS games in general than 16. 32 on the other hand can wrap around short integer variables and thus some games will complain if you set the RAM that high.

* Although the "max" cycles setting should work for most users (especially once you turn SVGA graphics on with the R key), it may STILL run way too fast on some systems. In this case, try a high fixed-cycles setting, such as 100,000, but keep in mind that even a fixed cycles count will cause other issues depending on how much processing the game is doing. Alas, there is no way to get the speed of Magic Carpet to be perfect, and it was especially bad on real hardware since you were stuck with whatever speed you ended up with. :/

* Amazingly, there appears to be a floppy disk version of this game! All I've managed to find in regards to its existence is a single low-resolution photo which definitely confirms it existed, but I haven't been able to dig up any other details! :o

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