Emulating MegaBall

MegaBall Title Screen
MegaBall Game Screen

MegaBall is a breakout-style game made by Ed and Al Mackey on the Amiga platform. It's recognized as one of the best ShareWare games for that platform, winning many awards and positive reviews from the Amiga magazines of the day. Many different versions have been released spanning many years.

Although the Amiga platform is far from popular today, MegaBall may now be played on many different platforms through emulation. The most recognized Amiga emulator is UAE, and it's the recommended emulator for MegaBall, since some other emulators have difficulty running MegaBall. UAE is available for many platforms:

  • WinUAE for most versions of MicroSoft Windows
  • MacUAE for Macintosh
  • UAE for UNIX and similar systems
  • DOS-UAE for MS-DOS
  • Other versions are listed on the UAE webpage

Aside from the emulator, you'll also need KickStart ROM images and a copy of Workbench. Although these are easy to find on the net, it's technically illegal to distribute these to people who don't have them already (that is, people who didn't buy an Amiga at some point), so I can't offer them here, and don't ask me for them.

The zip file contains three ADFs, which are files that act like floppy disks to the emulator. On these floppies is the full version of MegaBall, complete with the extra music disk and board editor. Unlike most ADFs, MegaBall cannot be ran directly from these floppies. It's best that you make a directory on your hard drive somewhere where you have some space, and make a virtual hard drive to use it (in WinUAE, this is done on the "Hard Drives" panel, with the "Add Directory" button). Once you install Workbench on the hard drive, reboot the emulator from it. Then, insert the three floppies and use the installer on the first one to install MegaBall to the hard drive.

For MegaBall to work, the sound emulation mode must be set to "Emulated, 100% accurate". Sound Buffering is also recommended. Slower computers may have problems keeping up with real time, resulting in choppy-sounding music and gameplay. The best way to increase emulator efficiency is to decreace the refresh rate (on the Display Settings screen in WinUAE) as needed.

The MegaBall ADFs can be downloaded here:
MegaBall4.zip (1.5 MB)





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