One of the problems with CannonBall feature development is that many of the remaining tasks are hard to achieve. Take the music selection screen for example; it's one of the parts of the game that isn't widescreen and remains letterboxed.

Now it would be easy to simply drop in a replacement graphic at this point and bypass the original code to display it. In fact many people have sent me such an image over the last couple of years in the hope I would do just that. But that's not really true to the ethos of what CannonBall is about. The real solution is to extend the original tilemap and use the tile layer to render the screen, rather than hack in a replacement.

Unfortunately, this approach needs a full tile editing tool, which is a rather complex way of achieving something that will look no different to the end user. Nevertheless, I'm writing such a tool so that tilemaps can be edited, new tiles created and the screen finally widened.

Here are some relatively high quality photos from the Outrun PCB manufactured under license by Sega to the Spanish company Unidesa. You can click on the images for a larger version and then right click to save a high quality version.

A new version of OutRun Enhanced Edition is out. This is the enhanced version of the original OutRun ROMs, designed to be programmed and used with the original hardware. This version includes some new features and fixes from Adrian Smethurst.

There are selectable timing system fixes; 60 seconds on the lap timer represents 60 genuine seconds in real-time and the correct time when passing the Checkpoint when EXTEND TIME is shown.
 
The timing system fixes can be toggled in the Diagnostics mode in the Dip Switch assignments screen by moving the gear stick. Your choice will be backed up when the machine is powered down.



There are improvements to high-score inital entry system. Backspace can be used over the final initial to match many other Sega titles.

The Last Wave music is also added as an option to the sound test menu.

The timing system fixes will also feature in the next version of CannonBall too for those interested.