Monkey Ball for DC

Anyone knows anything about Monkey Ball for Dreamcast?
I have some screenshots of it in my site:

http://dreamcast.es/readarticle.php?article_id=185




It says E3 Limited Version, so chances are that an E3 version exists somewhere.

I'm not so sure about this version being for Dreamcast though.

Any info on this?

 

A french site did have quite a few high resolution shots of the Dreamcast version that I've kept on my Hard Drive if you'd like to see them.

Yakumo

 

Could you check if they are the same ones that are on the link to my site?

If not, please post them here!

 

I saw them before, I think they were for the Nintendo GameCube version at time of E3. I think IGN has still got all the pictures of them.

http://uk.media.cube.ign.com/media/016/016538/imgs_21.html

Edit: But I think this picture has a Sega Dreamcast thumb stick in it though.

http://uk.cube.ign.com/dor/objects/16538/super-monkey-ball/images/smkb17.html

 

Looks like a Gamecube thumbstick to me - what with the octagonalness, rounded circles and purpleness.

A Dreamcast thumbstick would be mushroom-shaped, rounded top and with a round casing.

(For those who can't be bothered to check, here's a pic of a Dreamcast controller: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...Controller.jpg/800px-Dreamcast_Controller.jpg)

 

Its a gamecube thumb stick for sure

 

Hehe! I thought it looked like a Dreamcast thumb stick at first. ^_^

 

Sega conducted extensive research into the possibility of whether or not certain then-recent arcade titles would be technically within reach of the Dreamcast's capabilities, and sadly Monkey Ball failed to make the grade. Others known to have missed out following this preliminary stage of pre-development include Brave Firefighters, Planet Harriers and Virtua Fighter 4 to name just a few such examples, though at least the majority were later released for other hardware after the company went multiplatform.

 

The Dreamcast could have done Virtua Fighter 4 no problem, as could it have done Monkey ball no problem, I very much doubt any of the system's at the time could have done Planet harriers without seriously downgrading the title, same with Firefighter, as they used the Hikaru board, which was mighty powerful at certain thing's, and I doubt any Hikaru game could have been done on Ps2, Xbox, gamecube or Dreamcast.

But the Dreamcast with it's unique chipset was more than capable of doing anything everyone else done that generation, apart from a few xbox titles. It was a very powerrful machine and the only reason it looked a bit underpowered, was that developers were not used to harnessing that power when the dreamcast launched, but as you can see from it's last titles, had it stayed on the market, it could have done anything the others could have done. I mean just look at Shenmue 2, and the other last titles released, and these were games that were started way before the other systems were launched, so the mind boggles at what could have been done on dreamcast had it lived longer in the massmarket.

The Hikaru games could be done with the recent systems such as the 360 and ps3, and high end pc's, but they couldn't have been done with the last generation system's. It was an extremely complex, dedicated chipset arcade board that was extremely powerful for it's time, and was years ahead of it's time as well.

Courtesy of System 16:

CPU : 2 x Hitachi SH-4 128 bit RISC CPU with graphic functions @ 200 MHz 360 MIPS / 1.4 GFLOPS
Graphic Engine : Sega Custom 3D
Sound Engine : "Super Intelligent Processor", 32-bit RISC CPU (64 channels ADPCM) (possibly an ARM7 Yamaha AICA @ 45 MHz with internal 32-bit RISC CPU, 64 channel ADPCM, same as in Naomi)
Main Memory : 64 Mbytes
Graphic Memory : 28 Mbytes
Sound Memory : 8 Mbytes
Media : ROM Board (max 352 MBytes)
Simultaneous Number of Colors : Approx. 16,770,000 (24bits)
Resolution : 24 KHz, 496x384, 31 KHz 640x480
Polygons : 2 Million polys a sec
Shading : Phong Shading
Lighting : Horizontal, Spot, 1024 lights per scene, 4 lights per polygon, 8 window surfaces.
Effects : (at least) Phong Shading, Fog, Depth Queueing, Stencil, Shadow, Motion blur
Others Capabilties : Bitmap Layer x 2, Calender, Dual Monitor (24 kHz)
Extensions : communication, 4 channel audio, PCI, MIDI, RS-232C
Connection : Jamma Video complient
Notes : This board was totally custom and very expensive to produce, it was only really designed for one game (Brave Fire Fighters) as it could do complex fire/water graphics.
There were eventually only 6 games made for this system beforce it was dropped in favour of the much cheaper Naomi 2.
It was also the first arcade board to be able to do phong shading.

As you can see by the specs of the Hikaru board, it was far, far too powerful for the last generation to even attempt, look at the amount of ram it had, and the two processors on the board. Christ, until I looked that up, I had no idea it had that much horsepower, though once you have played harriers, you see how damn powerful the system was!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Just imagine if Sega had followed up the Dreamcast with something of this power if they had had the money, they would have wiped the floor with the ps2, and xbox and gamecube. It's a damn pity more games were not made for the system, as it was a really lovely piece of kit specs wise.

 

Like it says in the description, the Hikaru was only ment to run a few games. It might have been less able to play games that used more general programing methods. Thats why it was dropped in favour of Naomi 2, and even if Sega had made a home Naomi 2 (or Hikaru) it would have cost more than a PS2 and Xbox together.

 

Monkey Ball was a NAOMI = Dreamcast game...

 

Yeh but the Naomi was a suped up Dreamcast. While games could be "downgraded" not all could cut the cheese so to speak.

 

The only major difference is RAM and ROM. If you want to see a Naomi to Dreamcast conversion, play Crazy Taxi. The biggest changes were load times and lower texture resolution.

Edit: And Monkey Ball is hardly a texture intensive game... And DOA2 got away with having no load screens between levels.

 

I do imagine someone has a dev build of super monkey ball though..

IGN is supposed to have Dreamcast videos of the game, but they aren't playing for me:
super-monkey-ball-dreamcast-video-2001-05-02
super-monkey-ball-dreamcast-video-2001-05-02-1
super-monkey-ball-dreamcast-video-2001-05-02-2
super-monkey-ball-dreamcast-video

Some thumbs from google's cache of ign's videos:





Speaking of monkeyball, Chui made a clone in 2007 fittingly dubbed "neverball".
http://www.youtube.com/v/346Jo0s0iow
http://www.youtube.com/v/0rY2heRuTbk
http://www.dcemu.co.uk/vbulletin/threads/67260-Neverball-first-alpha-version-released

 

I didn't find that neverball played much like monkeyball. The concept was there, but the controls and physics did not mirror monkey ball, at least the DC port with the DC pad.

Here are some more bits concerning a possible dreamcast version, all from IGN articles in 2001.

http://www.ign.com/articles/2001/01/12/new-from-sega-monkey-ball

http://www.ign.com/articles/2001/04/18/sega-pledges-gamecube-support

So in January 2001, the game was known to be in development for Naomi. In April 2001, optimistically (assuming its not a typo) it was in development for dreamcast. The IGN videos which say it is dreamcast in the title are from May 2001. And in September 2001, Super Monkey Ball was released on Gamecube. Wikipedia has the arcade release date as January 2nd 2001...

 

That's somewhat informative, thanks for sharing. Were you able to watch the IGN videos?

 

dreamcast was withdrawn in north America during march 2001, so it's very possible that it made the jump to gamecube purely because of that.

 

No they don't work for me either. They may be invalid. But, the only place I have ever really heard any mention of Monkey Ball for DC is on IGN... Can you find any other mention - or videos which are associated with a DC preview? I think this might have been speculation by IGN...

Also, did some research and E3 in 2001 was around May 20th, so these videos would have been a little early. Additionally, according to websites I just googled, Sega didn't show off Monkey Ball or Super Monkey Ball at 2001's E3.

Tokyo Game Show in 2001 was in September of 2001, and Super Monkey Ball was previewed as a Gamecube title. Very few DC titles were previewed, and Monkey Ball was not one of them.

A final note - I think the added background graphics in Super Monkey Ball are beyond the dreamcast's hardware capabilities, so I would take any pictures of Super Monkey Ball with the lush high poly far draw distance backgrounds as a dreamcast title with a grain of salt. The naomi version had much simpler backgrounds and I would have expected that a DC conversion would be along those lines for memory reasons.

 

Well that sucks, that's the only place that seems to have some kind of media. There are download links below to quicktime 320x240 files but only for ign prime users >.< ..
Lots of places were talking about Monkey Ball on DC but I can't find any info associated with a preview.
I reckon GameSpot should've had something similar but all their dc content has been removed fully a long time ago.

The timing of the videos suggest either speculation in before E3 or actual hype videos.

What you're saying about the technical stuff sounds reasonable but I really can't contest nor agree because of my limited knowledge..

 

Without reading the entire thread (cause there's a ton of stuff here), having played the arcade version, I think it's pretty safe to say that the DC could've handled Monkey Ball as it was on the Naomi. It was simpler, graphically, than Super Monkey Ball, and I think even that game could've worked on the DC. Virtua Fighter 4, not so much. I would love to see a beta version of Monkey Ball, though. The control scheme for the arcade was kinda weird - you use a large banana to steer your monkey. In some ways I like the visuals more than its Gamecube successor.