I've played Spinball on an overclocked Genesis before that can reach an acceptable framerate, and I have to say it transforms the game. I *HATED* spinball when it released, it was by far my least favorite Sonic game for many, many, maaaaany years. Even compared to Labyrinth, Blast (not 3D blast), and such. I thought Spinball just outright felt bad to play. At full framerate, the game is actually not that bad, and feels a lot more like how a sonic pinball game should feel. Great updates!
I think it's fair to say that anyone who did persevere through the jank that Spinball undoubtedly has, can see that it is a bit of a diamond in the rough. I've never played any other games like it before its release or since. I do wonder if it was a little less jank in the PAL version, given that was a later version with numerous bug fixes. This does remind me, I'd love to look at applying the knowledge I've gained to also disassembling/decompiling the PAL version and Beta versions in the future. Would be nice to essentially diff the bug fixes and improvements that were made in the PAL version, and perhaps find cut features/content in the beta versions. It all depends on how radically different the C compilation is between them, but I'd anticipate that a lot of the signatures would be similar, just in different locations.
I am admittedly waiting patiently to see if anyone finds anything interesting in the level art themselves. I feel like this game was never properly dug through.
I hope that someday we're able to decompile the game to C, and port it to PC like they planned to originally.
J2ME version seems to have the OST in MIDI format, possibly the very same tracks that were fed through GEMS? Could use that in a Windows 9X port.
Sadly those are poorly done renditions of the GEMS tracks. Compositionally they are very different i.e. severely lacking.
Unfortunately J2ME's OST is incomplete. It only includes the stage themes, the title theme, and a game over jingle. No boss theme, no bonus stage theme, and most importantly, no options music.
You don't hate Sonic Spinball even half of how Sonic Spinball hates you for playing it. In my home, we loved it precisely for that., you could never know what was coming next. We even got to somewhat reliably glitch to go to the upper part of toxic caves without busting the pipe covers (as kids), despite needing to open them to drain the crap surrounding the emerald anyways. Also pressing Down after going upwards after busting the barrels on Toxic Caves just so Sonic ends up floating in the air with the floor simply not closing after he arrives just for the sake of it.
Today I've been able to uncover a lion's share of the Flipper behaviour and code. I've been able to redirect the table used by toxic caves, to successfully instantiate additional flippers. A general note on all of the level data that I've started to uncover, is that the per-level tables are all interlaced i.e. Instead of 4 clean blocks of data; each type of data is separated instead and has indices to each level e.g. Convenient level data: Code (Text): - Toxic Caves - Tiles - Flippers - etc - Lava Powerhouse - Tiles - Flippers - The Machine - ... - Showdown - ... Interlaced data: Code (Text): - Tiles - Toxic Caves - Lava Powerhouse - The Machine - Showdown - Flippers - Toxic Caves - Lava Powerhouse - The Machine - Showdown - etc P.S. Can we get a Community Hacking Guide wiki page for Spinball so I can collate all this info, pretty please?
Ohh I thought there was a permissions issue or something. I didn't realise that the forum and wiki logins were separate so I was trying to use my forum credentials. Resetting the password worked, so it probably had an ancient password from 2005 that I was never going to be able to remember, haha. All seems well now though, so I will look to get a page going over the coming days. Thanks~
A smaller update tonight, but I have been able to arbtrarily load the Bonus Stages from the main menu. I was able to achieve this without the weird visual ""corruption"" you see, but the screen remained black with gameplay running in the background. So currently I load a normal level and then the bonus stage to work around the issues of things not being initialised properly. It's possible that I will just need to locate how to fade up the black screen and everything may be there (I would hear gameplay in the background), but this acts as further confirmation that I'm on the right path. The game also correctly re-loads back to the main menu with no obvious corruption or issues and I can play multiple times. This narrows the window significantly for locating the procedures for loading tile data and sprite assets.
It's kind of interesting that the Crawl badnik has is older design before he was redrawn (as in redrawn from the American art, not the redesign to face forward). His pincer thing is gray, and not yellow.
Been making some significant ground on understanding the game objects used. There is a lot of commonality between the objects, such as always having an AnimatedSprite object at the head of the struct, same X/Y position locations etc. But some parts appear to be flexible bits of memory for some classes, such as additional ptrs for explosion effects (on worms for example), and even things like horizontal velocity for objects like the Toxic Caves Serpent. I was also able to uncover a good chunk of how the state machines are driven, including starting to uncover tables of data that specify different animated objects for each "state id" for different game objects. I quickly recorded a little clip showing some of these things with a bit of live memory editing. (the volume is low because I don't want to be deafened by Toxic Caves playing on loop all night. :D)
Have you found a way to alter patches in the game's data yet? It'd be interesting to see if the TL value in the infamous "tesla coil" patch can be altered to be quieter, because the last time I was checked it was literally set to 0 (aka the maximum value).
