Hiscore Competition rules

[Harrison]

Welcome to the Games Hiscore Competition section.

Compete against fellow classicamiga members by playing games for the highest score in each competition.

Each competition will feature a specific game. To make it easy for everyone to join in, each game will be playable via emulation. Details will be given about how to obtain each game used, which emulators they will run in and how to set the emulator up to play the game.

If you have the original game and the original system available then you are free to play the game on the real system instead of via emulation if you prefer. Just make sure you are able to take a digital photograph of the screen in some way as evidence of your hiscore.

Games do not have to be for only the Amiga. Games for any platform are accepted as a competition as long as the game is easy to obtain for all members to be able to play and take part in the competition. The only requirement is that any game chosen must have a hiscore system.

Good platforms for competitions include MAME, Amiga, and SNES. But most others such as C64, NES, Genesis, Master system, and even Atari 2600 will work just as well for a competition.

Main rules of the competition

If a game contains different levels of difficulty then the level you have to play the game at will be stated in the competition when it starts. Everyone must play the game using the stated difficulty level to make the competition as fair as possible.

Normally if a difficulty level is selectable for a game it will the the average or normal difficulty level that is used.

If any other special conditions are also required for the game these will also be stated at the start of the competition. A good example would be a pinball game with a selection of different tables. The table being used for the competition would therefore be stated.

If a game was released in a number of different versions, the version being used for the competition will also be stated.

No cheats or trainers may be used whilst playing the game. We hope that all members will refrain from cheating as this will spoil the whole point of the competitions and we hope everyone on here can be trusted to be competing for fun and not to cheat.

Evidence of your hiscore

To prove you obtained a valid hiscore in the game you need to take a screenshot of the hiscore table showing your initials entered next to your hiscore clearly visible in the screenshot. Where a game only shows just the highest score this will also be acceptable as evidence.

When taking a screenshot please save the image you are going to post as evidence at a size of 640x480 or less. And please keep the filesize as small as possible because once a few members have posted their hiscore screenshots the thread pages will start to contain lots of large images and may take some time to load for people with slower connections.

File format and sizes required for Images

Acceptable image formats for competitons are JPG, GIF and PNG.

Formats such as BMP will not be acceptable as the file format does not compress the files and the files end up being very large. As an example a BMP file containing a 640x480 screenshot would be over 600KB in size, where as a JPG of the same dimensions with 90% compression would still look nearly as good but only be 14KB in size.

When taking screenshots from games for older platforms, such as the Amiga, SNES or 8-bit systems, the PNG format is the best to use when taking screenshots from emulators. This keeps the filesize as small as possible and you have the option when creating a PNG to save the image with the number of colours the original game used to make the filesize even smaller. For example, an Amiga A500 screenshot could be saved as a 32 colour 640x480 PNG and this would retain the quality and detail of the original, whilst making the filesize quite small.

If any member doesn't have access to programs for creating PNG and JPG images please let me know as there are many good free utilities and applications available to do this for you and they are easy to use.

As a main rule try to keep all screenshots under 60KB and if possible under 40KB.

If you are taking photographs of monitors or TV screens from real systems that you are using to play the game then the JPG format will be better than PNG as photographs will be much smaller in file size and clearer.

If anyone is unsure of how to best save their images please let me know and I can guide them through the best options.

Submitting your screenshot

Important: Images for competitions must be uploaded the the classicamiga members gallery. See the post below for further details.
To submit your hiscore screenshot it must be posted in the topic for the specific competition.

When posting your screenshot you must embed the image into your post using the forum [IMG] tag to link you images into your posts (using the image icon when creating your post) instead of attaching the image to the post as this will then show the screenshots in the post, making them easier to instantly see.

Important: Images posted as attachments will not be accepted for competition entries.

Along with the image also give details for the score. If the score is shown alongside a name or initials please state the name or initials for the hiscore you wish to submit as your hiscore.

So you would post something like: Hiscore for DJH of 1,234,567.

Discussing the scores

Everyone is welcome to also post in the hiscore topic to discuss the currently posted hiscores and the game being played in general.

Time Limit

A time limit for the competition will be set at it's start. A good length is probably 2 weeks to give most members a chance to have a go at getting a hiscore. If some members are unable to compete you may ask for the competition to be extended.

Winner

Once the competition is over a hiscore table for that game will be posted listing everyones scores. The first three places in the competition will win points (stated at the start of the competition) and the overall winner will be given an award trophy that will appear in their profile, and under their avatar in their posts.

Beating a score after the competition

Although the competitions have an official ending date everyone is still free to continue playing for a higher score and posting them in the related games topic. Higher scores will not remove the original winner from their award, but new higher scores will gain the member an award in their profile too for achieving the new hiscore.

Starting a new Hiscore competition

All members are welcome to start a new Hiscore competition choosing any game you would like to be played. When creating a new competition please post a new thread stating the game to be played in the thread Title, and then listing the rules and requirements for the game to be played.

For example:

Title: R-Type competition

Welcome to the R-Type hiscore competition.

Game to be played: R-Type
Platform: Amiga A500 OCS
Emulator: WinUAE (config: A500 OCS KS1.3 512K Chip 512K slow)
Difficulty Level: Normal
Length of Competition: 2 Weeks (ending 12:00 21st Jan '07)
Competition Rules: Obtain the highest score!

Points to be won:
Ist Place: 5000 points
2nd Place: 2000 points
3rd Place: 500 points

Game Files: Game ADFs (attachment)

Providing game files for competition

When posting a new competition, if you wish to provide the roms or adf files for the game with the competition then you may do as an attachment if you think it is legally ok. If you think the roms are copyright and might cause issues then please post them in the password protected "Private Downloads" forum of the File Requests section of the forum and then in the competition post include:

Game Files: See Private Downloads

I hope that all made sense. Hope you all enjoy the hiscore competitions and I look forward to seeing everyone take part.

[Harrison]

For Games competitions the following rules must be followed.

1. All images must be saved in the formats JPG, PNG or GIF. No other file formats such as BMP will be accepted.
2. All image files must be under 100KB in size. All images larger than this will either be reduced in size by a staff member if they have time, or the member who submitted the image will be asked to remove the image or reduce the file size.
3. All images must be 640x480 in dimension or smaller. Again any images larger than this in dimension will either be reduced in size by a staff member, or the member who submitted the image will be asked to remove the image or reduce the file size.
4. All competition images must be hosted on the classicamiga members gallery. See below for details.

The classicamiga members gallery

All members have an account on the main site's members gallery. This is created automatically with every membership account on the main site. To access your members gallery just log into the main site and click on the Members Gallery link under the Users menu. The members gallery will then launch in its own browser window with you automatically logged in under your main site username.

With each new competition a new image album will be created inside of the Hiscore Competitions section of the gallery. Each member can then upload their hiscore images into this competition album for submission into the competition.

An example of this can be seen in the gallery for the POD competition.

Once the images have been uploaded into the classicamiga members gallery they can then be linked into the competition's forum thread by creating a new post and the entering the gallery image you wish to submit using an [IMG] tag or by clicking on the Insert Image icon.

To obtain the URL to link to an image in the members gallery, view the image in the gallery you wish to link to and click it to open the full sized image in its own pop up window. Finally right click on the image and view it's properties. Use the URL it shows under the image properties to link to it from the forum.

For example, one of the Pod Competition images in the gallery could be linked to by using the URL:
http://www.classicamiga.com/coppermi...63/POD_005.png

If you need this explained in more detail let me know and I can do a short screenshot guide.

Reason for this decision:

Until now members submitting images to the site for competitions would either attach the images to their posts or host the images on external image hosting sites such as paintbucket and then link to them in their posts.

Both of these methods are no longer accepted due to the following reasons.

1. Images attached to posts on the site are saved into the site database. This increases the size of the database unnecessarily and slows down backup sessions.
2. Images hosted on external image hosting sites do work fine in most cases, but this doesn't guarantee the images will still be hosted in the future. Future removal of these images will leave broken image links on the forum which is not desired.
3. Images hosted on external image hosting sites also increases the chance of spyware and malware targetting the classicamiga server.