Oh, dear. I don't think that's an official copy. However, I do think there are official carts with the original title out there. I remember seeing an old YouTube video of some guy showing off his copy of Spinball (which had the official artwork), and when he turned it on, it had the original music. IIRC, the original music was the main focus of the video.
That's what I'm saying... some folks are very quick to dismiss YEARS of many, many claims of having that music by simply declaring their memories as bad. That's not how we do research. You need to prove that these people likely didn't have a legit copies by actually engaging with them. We've engaged with virtually nobody. For my part, I was unable to track down anyone with the archives I used. But if you remember the video and can track it down, that would be very helpful.
Yeah I did say most probably pirate, but I mistook his cart with mine, mine is the one with the official artwork. If there is anything to be tested ingame lemmie know.
The way I see it, all the people here who remember owning or seeing a retail copy of Spinball with Nakamura's music should be asked a very simple question: When did you hear Drossin's title theme for the first time? Because if there are multiple people who even in the 90's were under the impression that there were two different Spinball soundtracks on the market, these claims of the alternate music build being a retail copy would hold a lot more water.
I do think that "Where did you hear the Nakamura title for the first time?" is also a useful question, as some regions are much more likely to have pirated copies in circulation than others.
One thing I’m actually kinda curious about is the build of Sonic Spinball used in the Sonic Mega Collection August 15th Prototype; while the wiki says it is identical to the scene release, it may still be worth looking into; there’s a non-zero chance there are some minor diffferences (that being the lack of scene edits)
I just checked, and the ROM in that prototype is identical to the ROM that's floating around the internet. For anyone who wants to check this for themselves: the ROMs in the ISO are encrypted, so you have to use the Dolphin emulator in its debug mode to dump the emulated console's RAM while Spinball is running. Then you can open the memory dump in a hex editor and search for the string "SEGA" to find the ROM. To run Dolphin in its debug mode, you have to start it from the command line with '-d' as an argument.
