Museum of the Game® & International Arcade Museum® Forums

Hello everyone, you may remember my last post regarding bowl-o-rama where I was able to successfully crack the IO cards Encryption, however due to the recent release of the replacement gameboard I decided to hold off refining and releasing the patch until the game is no longer supported. I have since decided to move my attention to building a tool to easily load custom animations and music onto bowl-o-rama images. I have successfully reverse engineered how the animations work and I'm able to create uncompressed animations. I have also started working on a tool to manage the game assets to keep track of what items have been replaced and what items are original. Compressing the animations has proven to be tricky for whatever reason but I believe that will be necessary to run on original hardware... Right now I am testing on modern hardware with my patches and have no way to test on original hardware.

In order to continue development of this tool, that I will release for free once complete I hope to purchase a retro/pedestal version of the game from anyone in the northeast preferably within a couple hours of central MA but I am willing to travel beyond that. Unfortunately, I don't have a ton to budget towards it, but I am looking for one in the $5-600 range. If anyone has a lead, please let me know.

Anyways, please see the video below of a BOSS AMF animation running in game. Essentially the game uses a custom header and a stream of raw RGBA pixel values after the header. The compression seems to use a proprietary RLE compression and differential compression, so the next frame is only the difference of the last frame.


Ideally the tool will allow you to plug in your bowl-o-rama flash drive and it will auto backup the game assets to your PC, then allow you to change the music, all images including font, ball textures, ads, instructions, font, ect.

As of right now here is the current status of the project:

Complete:
  • Convert jpg to TGA images.
  • Load TGA images.
  • Convert GIF to uncompressed video.

Work in progress:
  • Video compression
  • Loading game assets directly from flash drive.

Todo:
  • .mp4 to animation.
  • Game asset management
  • Hot swapping 2nd USB drive for songs.
  • Test on real hardware.
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