Playing Super Monkey Ball with a monkey on a ball makes sense

Players can get an edge in Sega’s game Super Monkey Ball with the help of a unique DIY controller: a literally monkey in a ball which can be physically rotated instead of smashing a joystick into a gamepad.

Super Monkey Ball requires players to tilt and roll a series of complex floating platforms to control the monkey’s movements, so Sega designed the original arcade versions of the game with an oversized trackball controller.

This did not carry over to the console versions of the game, and since arcade machines typically cost thousands of dollars, the developer Tom Tilley decided to design and build a much cheaper solution made from recycled and 3D printed materials. “I’m a software developer, but I worked for about eight years as a fax and cell phone technician in the late ’80s, so I have some electronics knowledge that comes in handy with this sort of thing,” Tilley said. On the edge.

Tilley, now a software developer in Australia, spent nearly 10 years teaching at a university while living in Thailand, where he also taught a course that challenged students to create unique alternatives to game controllers.

It was there that the idea of ​​a giant trackball made from random recycled parts, an optical mouse and a basketball came to fruition. A base made of cardboard holds the basketball in place and allows it to roll freely in all directions with the help of three salvaged roll-on deodorant containers that serve as plastic bearings. Below the ball is an upgraded inverted optical mouse with another deodorant bearing that rolls whenever the ball rolls, making it easier for the mouse’s sensor to detect its movements.

The original version of the trackball was built to play a 1986 Japanese arcade game called armadillo racebut has since been modified by Tilley to play other games, including Katamari Damacy, with a soccer ball. Use it to play the Nintendo GameCube version of Super Monkey Ball through emulation required an additional modification, Tilley said On the edge.

A 3D-printed recreation of the game’s main character, a monkey named AiAi, walks around inside a clear plastic sphere on a heavy wheeled base that keeps him upright at all times. It’s a lovely upgrade, but the clear plastic has created a new problem. The ball’s smooth finish didn’t offer enough friction to move the mouse’s deodorant roller. To fix this, Tilley had to replace this part with a small rubber ball rolling on metal bearings so that the mouse’s optical sensor could detect AiAi’s movements.

To make the GameCube version of Super Monkey Ball To work with a DIY trackball, Tilley uses a scripting tool called Free Pie (Programmable Input Emulator) that inverts signals coming from the mouse and maps them to a virtual joystick compatible with the emulator software.

The first new game in Super Monkey Ball series in a decade will launch on Nintendo Switch this week. If Tilley can get the DIY trackball to work Super Monkey Ball Banana Rumblehe can dominate the game’s multiplayer mode.