August 2026

Getting MUCH closer to a new build. In the meantime:

If you have played Monkey Ball through flycast you may have noticed that in the minimap the stage can appear outside of the border. This is not how it is supposed to work, and can be seen in pretty much every video of emulated gameplay on YouTube.
This issue has been a pain for visually confirming that the minimap is rendering correctly. Apparently Flycast already has a fix for this, but the games need to be added manually and the only one in there is Cosmic Smash.

I have opened an issue about this on the Flycast GitHub

Many functions are being recovered, and I am still focusing on getting a stable build ready.

For anyone that has not found it yet in the current build... If you hold L+R on the title screen and hit START it will enter the stage select I use for testing. Hit the B button while paused to quit a stage and return to the selection screen.

I have also seen in a few posts across the web that some people think the current build does not have sound because they are playing in an emulator. Apparently the sound only works if played with Flycast version 2.7

Stumbled across footage of my Monkey Ball port being played by CostenaroPlay using GYRO CONTROLS on the Dreamcolor Plus controller. CostenaroPlay mentions that they work on the VMU image colorization team and the controller was developed by angelo128bits.

Pretty cool!

Check out the YouTube Video

Sadly not much to report today. I'm specifically working on recovering exact CPU instructions per frame on Advanced Extra Floor 5.

The performance focus is still going strong, and more things are starting to surface.
Currently, the biggest performance gain seems to be coming from exact reproduction of the lighting engine. Using Advanced Extra Floor 5 as a test has been very useful because it is one of the more complex stages in the game with MANY moving platforms.
As of writing this, I have been researching this single floor for multiple days and performance has gone from 15FPS to 30FPS.

While looking through official development documentation and SDKs I came across NAOMI on DC 000920. This SDK is specifically for converting Naomi games to the Dreamcast and was released in September 2000.
So far this kit has already been useful as it has matched/recovered 69 rendering functions.

Naomi ROM decompilation is still going strong, but it has drifted away from the amount that has been reimplemented into the Dreamcast version.
Because of this I have added a second progress bar to the site.

New builds will have version numbers that match the percentage of the Port Progress bar.
The current available build is still the most playable version on real hardware, which is why it is so far behind.

Edit - I forgot to mention that the chat page on the site has been swapped to a shoutbox.

Progress is making way as usual.
I have concluded that the main performance issue is actually NOT the minimap as I originally thought.

Current research is focused on:
- Moving platform/model transforms and animation
- Collision repeated mesh tests
- Stage object update frequency and dependency chains
- Geometry submission from animated platforms

Many features are being recovered right now.
- MeeMee & Baby are in progress
- Stage background effects and extra layers
- Minimap

The main issue is the minimap. Each stage needs to be tested for performance. Currently the slowest stage runs at around 40FPS.
Because of this there will be no new build until each stage is running closer to 60FPS.

Work is still progressing on the minimap. Much of the logic has been restored and is now in the fine tuning stages.
Lighting for the most part has been restored.
There will be no new build until the minimap is somewhat stable and performance has been verified on real hardware.

Much of the work being done right now needs to be done in series.
Restoring the minimap needs the lighting logic restored.
Restoring the lighting needs full stage startup logic restored.

A new version is ready!

Fixes:
- Restored banana animations and collision detection
- Fixed replay-transition texture corruption/flashing
- Removed minimap marker until full restoration is complete

A new version is ready!

Fixes:
- New placeholder title screen
- Restored menus

Known Issues
- Aiai is the only playable character
- The game can stutter while the disc is being read

A new version is ready!

Fixes:
- Various collision corrections
- Advanced Floor 10 deforming surface
- Beginner Extra 1 platform blur
- Beginner Floor 8 complete moving DOLE logo
- General gameplay, transition, audio, rendering, and stage-data fixes

Much of today is focused on restoring Advanced mode Floor 10.
This is the bonus stage with the deforming liquid floor.
The next build should include this fix, as well as multiple sound fixes.

Welcome to the Monkey Ball Dreamcast website.
A ROM of the original NAOMI Monkey Ball is required to activate the download.

Development updates will be posted here as the project progresses.

Stay tuned for more details!