Ok played a bit of it.
Some feed back:
1. D-Pad Down should launch the ball instead of D-PAD Up. Sorta like how you'd pull the plunger back and let go to launch ball on a real pinball machine and I'm sure most pinball video games are like this too. The original Windows game defaulted to Space bar so I don't think you would be hurting the authenticity of the port by changing this button bind. I found my self hitting D-Pad down a lot when trying to launch the ball so this seems a bit annoying.
2. This might require some major work on the graphics engine so not sure how viable this would be but it would be nice for there to be a split screen mode. Top half of pinball machine on top screen and bottom half on bottom screen. You'd use one of the screens for score and such temporarily when starting new game and while holding a specific button any other time. (or show a simplified score display and display the full score UI when ball needs to be launched again). Not sure how you'd rework the UI for this to make room for score display otherwise but it would be nice to get the best resolution of the board via this dual screen approach.
3. Touch based controls because why not. Maybe consider this a stretch goal.
Can't really think of anything else really. I made a special DLDI driver some time back that allows using direct card reads to read a raw disk image from cart rom...A ROM drive of sorts.
It's similar to an old FCSR driver for gba flashcards that read a fat image from PSRAM/SDRAM of gba flashcard. Only mine does slot-1 card command instead.
This isn't usable on normal flashcarts but I was able to use this on my N-Card which is a old flash cart that does hardware level based retail card read redirects. (aka does not patch games to read from cart storage. This is possible because this is a nand based cart and not MicroSD like modern carts) and it does this even for homebrew provided you use the normal B7 card read commands.
Seems to work great. I'd recompile this with proper 32KB DLDI driver support (N-Card uses a 19KB DLDI driver) but I don't have BlocksDS stuff setup for compiling them so I used my special driver instead. No write access as a result but it doesn't look like this game currently needs that for anything. (I suppose you might plan on saving high score to a file somewhere eventually though so maybe this would become a problem eventually.
)
