Cool. Can we take this to DM? I’ll give you the info I have gathered so far

Time to inject fresh life into this thread with good news:

we finally got it after all this time.

The registered version of baller and forget, direct from the author:

https://www.plutoniumbytes.com/BALLER!.zip

Enjoy!

Congratulations! That's very lucky indeed!

Does Holger declare it fully freeware? Maybe you could also ask if the source code would be made public was well? I'd love this to become a fully free/libre game under a free license.

Ohh, and BTW, what about Space Destruction also by him? Is the version off the site which is preserved by the Wayback Machine the complete one? Maybe also the source code could be made public?

Hi there. So sadly according to him the sources to baller and space destruction are gone.

Space destruction is a full game.

And he explicitly said the following:

Hallo,

es hat eine Weile gedauert, aber ein Freund von mir hatte wirklich noch eine Kopie der Vollversion, es sind sogar ein paar Savegames mit Fortschritt dabei.

Es darf gern everöffentlicht werden. Merke auch gerade, dass es jetzt recht genau 30 Jahre alt ist, ich habe es neben der Schule gebaut als ich 17 war 🙂

Viele Grüße
Holger Wagner

So I believe it’s fair game to everyone.

Take note: there are a few things to get the sound working right: works only on SB16 mode in IRQ5, and in a win95/98 Dosbox, as the folks in ExoDOS found out.

starlord wrote on 2026-10-05, 19:43:

Hi there. So sadly according to him the sources to baller and space destruction are gone.

That's regrettable, but ah well. At least both games are there in their full versions.

starlord wrote on 2026-10-05, 19:43:

And he explicitly said the following: […]
Show full quote

And he explicitly said the following:

Hallo,

es hat eine Weile gedauert, aber ein Freund von mir hatte wirklich noch eine Kopie der Vollversion, es sind sogar ein paar Savegames mit Fortschritt dabei.

Es darf gern everöffentlicht werden. Merke auch gerade, dass es jetzt recht genau 30 Jahre alt ist, ich habe es neben der Schule gebaut als ich 17 war 🙂

Viele Grüße
Holger Wagner

So I believe it’s fair game to everyone.

Thanks for clarifying this! And again, a lovely addition to the liberated games pool.

starlord wrote on 2026-10-05, 19:43:

Take note: there are a few things to get the sound working right: works only on SB16 mode in IRQ5, and in a win95/98 Dosbox, as the folks in ExoDOS found out.

Thank you! If I remember correctly, I failed to make the sound work in the shareware version. Did I get this right that the game wants to have Win9x around to work with sound? If so, I wonder if there's any way to fix that via a TSR or something.

...

@mrflibble, actually yes, that is correct. It has to do with a programming error in the game. Here’s the expertise coming from ExoDOS:

```I found the cause. BALLER!S.EXE has a complete Sound Blaster engine: it mixes 16 channels into a 1 KB buffer and plays it by DMA, refilling the buffer from the card's interrupt (IRQ). The credits saying "Keiner" is just out of date. Two bugs in that engine explain why DOSBox stays silent.

1. IRQ 5 is hard-coded. The game reads the base, IRQ and DMA from the BLASTER variable and attaches its handler to that IRQ. But the code that switches the IRQ on at the interrupt controller always enables IRQ 5: it computes 1 shl 5 instead of using the IRQ it just read. eXoDOS/DOSBox defaults to IRQ 7, so the game listens on IRQ 7 while only IRQ 5 is switched on. Playback starts with a 1-byte transfer meant to trigger the first interrupt, and with IRQ 7 that interrupt never arrives. That gives exactly "no sound at all".

2. It never turns the speaker on. The game never sends the DSP command that enables output (D1). A real SB16 ignores that command and is always on, and so is DOSBox's SB16, but an SB 1.x/2.0/Pro stays muted. So it can only work as an SB16.```

```The first round showed I'd missed something: the IRQ and speaker bugs are real, but there's a third problem that silences the game in every setup.

What I missed: the game doesn't put its sound buffer in normal memory. It writes the sound into segment B000h, the old monochrome video memory, and points the Sound Blaster's DMA there. The code first allocates a proper buffer, then throws it away and uses B000h. The author probably did this because the proper buffer didn't work for him.

On a VGA card in the 320×200 256-colour mode (mode 13h) the game uses, that memory area doesn't exist. The game mixes the sound into nothing, and the card plays back an empty buffer, so you hear silence. That explains all five silent tests. It probably worked for the author because he played it in a Windows 95 DOS box (the PIF files point that way), which may well make that area behave like normal memory.```

dr.zeissler wrote on Yesterday, 13:35:

What about "Darius Gaiden"

You're not going to get Taito to freeware their famous 1994 arcade shmup that got ported to Saturn which got ported to Windows 95 in 1998 but also got ported by M2 to Steam in 2021.

Also it's nothing like Raptor at all.

starlord wrote on Yesterday, 15:41:

```The first round showed I'd missed something: the IRQ and speaker bugs are real, but there's a third problem that silences the game in every setup.

What I missed: the game doesn't put its sound buffer in normal memory. It writes the sound into segment B000h, the old monochrome video memory, and points the Sound Blaster's DMA there. The code first allocates a proper buffer, then throws it away and uses B000h. The author probably did this because the proper buffer didn't work for him.

On a VGA card in the 320×200 256-colour mode (mode 13h) the game uses, that memory area doesn't exist. The game mixes the sound into nothing, and the card plays back an empty buffer, so you hear silence. That explains all five silent tests. It probably worked for the author because he played it in a Windows 95 DOS box (the PIF files point that way), which may well make that area behave like normal memory.```

I was able to play with sound by setting IRQ to 5 in DOSBox SVN Daum. No idea how this particular build bypasses this problem. Vanilla DOSBox, DOSBox-X and DOSBox-Staging don't play any sound.

It's not a biggie, since there seem to be just a couple of sound effects; almost as if sound was a last-minute addition? But still it would be nice if this were somehow circumvented.