Speedball 2 reverse engineering & remake

[kamelito]

Seeing Kroha website he must be French so I bet it is not him.

[jotd]

Yes, Kroah is french and his first name isn't Chris.

[NameOfTheGame]

Originally Posted by Kroah

Well, i'll try to sum up the process.

I use the following Windows softwares:
- Steem Engine with its extremely powerful debugger (sorry, but WinUAE debugger is awful and unstable)
- IDA (something similar to ReSource) to disassemble
- Ultraedit to edit some hex files
- Visual Studio C# Express

Hope you liked the read,
Cheers

Wanted to ask what version of IDA (Free, Home, Pro) you use and do you use any of the modules like the decompiler?

[reassembler]

Originally Posted by padrino

Hi,

just saw a video on YT, where Chris White (the guy from the Cannonball Enginge of Outrun) tells a story about porting Speedball 2).

[ Show youtube player ]

Now, that's not you, is it?

CU,
padrino

SpeedBall 2 was a really (really) fun project. Couldn't believe I got paid to do it. Got to meet Mike Montgomery and went for a beer or two with him!

I actually had a version of SpeedBall 2 you could play multiplayer via Bluetooth with two oldskool Nokia feature phones!

However, the mobile market consisted of literally hundreds of phone models at the time. So compatibility testing was a nightmare, and sadly that feature was dropped just before release. This was a time before the iPhone, Android and app stores as we know them today. The market was fragmented and phones exceptionally underpowered.

I even had a version of SpeedBall 2, that ran on low end Nokia's that squeezed into 64K file size (code, art, audio) which was released. I had to recolour the opposing team in realtime to fit it into memory. Those low-end devices only had 210K of free memory for the JVM - byte code, gfx, everything!

We did a few Bitmap Brothers conversations. I worked on SpeedBall 2, as it was one of my favourite Amiga games. Another coder did Chaos Engine, but rewrote it from scratch. One of my colleagues was a C64 and Amiga demo coder and helped out with the sprite conversion.

I had SpeedBall 2 running frame-by-frame perfect vs. the Genesis version. From memory, I also have prototype versions of SpeedBall 2. But as that was a commercial project, I can't share any information on them.

I also worked on a number of Sega projects around that time, including Sonic. I'd always try to get hold of the original codebase to work from.

Fun fact - Sonic The Hedgehog shares the same 68k random number generator as OutRun. Right down to the seed.

[jotd]

for me the Bitmap Brothers are the best game developers, period. Their games may not be technically impressive but the overall gameplay is just amazing.

By chance could you put us in contact with Sean Griffiths (Magic Pockets) and lure him here? I'd have a few questions

[reassembler]

I have no connections with Sean I'm afraid. Dan Malone is the only other BB I've met. But yes, Bitmap Brothers did an awesome job on the Amiga specifically.

[jotd]

Dan Malone graphics are incredible! Mark Coleman kind of imitated him and his graphics were also great.
What a team!