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Balls of Steel

From PCGamingWiki, the wiki about fixing PC games
Balls of Steel
Balls of Steel cover
Developers
Wildfire Studios
Publishers
GT Interactive
3D Realms
Release dates
Windows December 12, 1997
macOS (OS X) May 5, 2015[1]
Taxonomy
Monetization One-time game purchase
Modes Singleplayer, Multiplayer
Perspectives Top-down view
Genres Pinball
Series Balls of Steel
Balls of Steel on HowLongToBeat
Balls of Steel on IGDB
Balls of Steel on MobyGames
Balls of Steel on Wikipedia
Balls of Steel
Balls of Steel 1997
Balls of Steel (2024) 2024

Balls of Steel is a singleplayer and multiplayer top-down view pinball game in the Balls of Steel series.

This version includes five tables: Barbarian, Darkside, Duke Nukem, Firestorm and Mutation.

General information

GOG.com Community Discussions
GOG.com Support Page
Steam Community Discussions
Pinball Maniac entry

Availability

Source DRM Notes Keys OS
Retail
DRM details are not known
Windows
GOG.com (unavailable)
DRM-free
Windows
Steam (unavailable)
Icon overlay.png
Windows
macOS (OS X)
No longer sold digitally due to licensing issues.[2]

Essential improvements

The following improvements are meant only for the retail version, not the digital ones.

Patches

Patches are available to fix various issues. An unofficial v1.3c is also available.

BOS Loader

Adds windowed mode, bilinear filtering and Direct3D renderer.

Game data

Configuration file(s) location

System Location
Windows HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wildfire Studios\Balls of Steel[Note 1]
macOS (OS X)
Steam Play (Linux) <Steam-folder>/steamapps/compatdata/358430/pfx/[Note 2]

Save game data location

System Location
Windows HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wildfire Studios\Balls of Steel\High scores[Note 1]
macOS (OS X)
Steam Play (Linux) <Steam-folder>/steamapps/compatdata/358430/pfx/[Note 2]

Save game cloud syncing

System Native Notes
GOG Galaxy
Steam Cloud

Video

General settings
General settings

Graphics feature State WSGF Notes
Widescreen resolution
Multi-monitor
Ultra-widescreen
4K Ultra HD
Field of view (FOV)
Windowed
Toggle with Alt+ Enter or F. Easily resizable by dragging borders.
Borderless fullscreen windowed
See the glossary page for potential workarounds.
Anisotropic filtering (AF)
Anti-aliasing (AA)
Vertical sync (Vsync)
See the glossary page for potential workarounds.
60 FPS
120+ FPS

Input

Audio

Audio feature State Notes
Separate volume controls
Surround sound
Subtitles
Closed captions
Mute on focus lost
Royalty free audio

Localizations

Language UI Audio Sub Notes
English

Network

Multiplayer types

Type Native Players Notes
Local play
4 Hot seat
LAN play
Online play

Issues fixed

StickyKeys keeps re-enabling

Rebind the keys or replace the launcher the inside installation folder[3]

Download the replacement launcher from PCGamingWiki repository and replace the old one inside the installation folder. Otherwise flippers can be rebound to other keys.

Slowdown in Scrolling table view

Run in Windows XP compatibility mode[4]
  1. Right-click the shortcut for the game, choose Properties and then Compatibility tab.
  2. Change Compatibility Mode to Windows XP SP3.
Load bos.exe inside the installation folder[citation needed]
If you still experience the problem, load bos.exe inside the installation folder instead.

Game won't run on Steam Deck

Use dgVoodoo2[5]
  1. Download the latest version of dgVoodoo 2 and extract the archive.
  2. Open the MS\x86 folder and copy D3D8.dll, D3DImm.dll, DDraw.dll, and D3D9.dll files.
  3. Paste the files into the game installation folder where the executable is.
  4. Add the following command line argument WINEDLLOVERRIDES='ddraw.dll=n' %command%
  5. Optional: Run the included dgVoodooCpl.exe program in the game installation folder and configure the settings.

Other information

API

Executable 32-bit 64-bit Notes
Windows
macOS (OS X)

System requirements

Windows
Minimum Recommended
Operating system (OS) XP, Vista, 7, 8
Processor (CPU) 1.8 GHz
System memory (RAM) 512 MB
Hard disk drive (HDD) 100 MB
Video card (GPU) DirectX 7 compatible


Notes

  1. 1.0 1.1 Applications writing to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE will be redirected to other locations based on various criterias, see the glossary page for more details.
  2. 2.0 2.1 File/folder structure within this directory reflects the path(s) listed for Windows and/or Steam game data (use Wine regedit to access Windows registry paths). Games with Steam Cloud support may store data in ~/.steam/steam/userdata/<user-id>/358430/ in addition to or instead of this directory. The app ID (358430) may differ in some cases. Treat backslashes as forward slashes. See the glossary page for details.

References