Clowns for joystick

[doug_in_nc]

I'm sure most people here are familiar with the Commodore cartridge game Clown (VIC-1931). Online copies of the game are available for both joystick and paddles, and from a couple of posts I am led to believe that both of them were actual cartridges and the joystick variant wasn't just a hacked version of the paddles one. Assuming that is so, is there a way to identify which is which other than playing them? Some boxes state that the game only work with paddles on the front, but others don't have that text. Can I assume that those ones work with joysticks or not? I would like to be able to pick up the joystick version some time in the future (I have the paddle version) and it would be great to know which was which rather than repeatedly buying cartridges on E Bay in the hope of getting the right version.

[Mike]

My understanding of those early posts in Denial about VIC-1931 Clowns is: only one "official" cartridge ROM version of Clowns exists, part number 901277-01, with paddle support. Though, during development, the developers had included joystick support, that was later removed for the cartridge release (witness quite some padding bytes in the cartridge ROM), but that development version somehow got leaked and had been preserved.

A ROM with different contents would have a different part number. You can savely exclude there exists a ROM with joystick support that has the same part number. If someone came up with, say, a part number "901277-XX", with XX other than 01, that'd be probably the one you want.