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Hyperbowl: Arcade Edition was a home PC release of the actual arcade game of the same name. While bowling videogames were nothing new in the early 2000s, Hyperbowl stood out for its aggressively Y2K aesthetic, unique locations, and especially its control scheme. There are no virtual bowlers in Hyperbowl; rather, players take control of the bowling ball directly, guiding it through obstacle courses in place of traditional lanes. The original arcade machine further turned the concept on its head by giving players a bowling ball-sized trackball like a giant upside-down mouse (when computer mice had such things, that is). There was and still is something just oddly satisfying about the whole experience, and strangely, there's been almost no attempts at duplicating or building on the formula ever since.
What most people may recognize Hyperbowl from, though, is not the arcade nor even its primary home edition. Instead, most players' first exposure came through the Windows XP Plus! suite of add-on software and game demos. I've even featured this collection myself as a preservation project of its own.
What I wasn't aware of at the time, however, is just how incomplete the Hyperbowl portion of it was. I've received many emails in recent months (largely prompted by the excellent Hyperbowl retrospective by LGR on YouTube) asking if I could provide the missing lanes from the Plus! package. Given the easy availability of the additional Labyrinth Plus! levels, for example, I had assumed the full version of Hyperbowl would not be so hard to come by. Not to mention, a former developer of Hyperbowl released both the original Arcade Edition and a remade Unity port for free on GitHub.
Unfortunately, the complete Hyperbowl Plus! experience is essentially lost media in 2025. No copies of the downloadable lanes currently exist on the internet (if you have one, please reach out!). While these are covered by the Arcade Edition, it lacks the fully interactive lane selection menu of the actual arcade version and Plus! XP. And even worse, Hyperbowl: Arcade Edition doesn't even run on modern editions of Windows anymore. That left only the remade Unity port, which certainly looks the part in screenshots, but can't really hold a candle to the original experience due to differences in physics engines.
This situation was more dire than I thought--I hear you, loud and clear!
Development History
Fortunately, bringing Hyperbowl: Arcade Edition up to a functioning state on Windows 11 turned out to be less of a challenge than I initially feared it would be. Attempting to run the game out of the box turns up a familiar, but unexpected error: the application is incompatible with 64-bit operating systems. Given that Windows has full 32-bit backwards compatibility, that means we're looking at a 16-bit executable.
Knowing that couldn't possibly be true for the game itself (especially given the Plus! XP edition), I did some digging and quickly learned that the Arcade Edition CD-ROM shipped with an early form of copy protection called CD-Cops. As with many DRM schemes, CD-Cops modifies the protected executable, essentially wrapping it inside its own and only launching if validation checks are passed. Given this DRM's vintage, it is only the wrapper executable which is 16-bit--something which wouldn't pose a problem on 32-bit editions of Windows, which in turn have full 16-bit backwards compatibility.
Now, in one sense, CD-Cops wasn't particularly effective. After all, the copy protection scheme itself was thwarted by crackers over 25 years ago, when it was still in active use. However, it did prove to be a notoriously frustrating moving target. Back in the day, a cracker known as Mr_Stop released a series of generic cracks for CD-Cops protected software, only for each one to be thwarted in return by updates to the DRM itself. These updates weren't more secure as much as they were merely different, mind you. Think shifting around some bytes of code so that patchers which rely on specific bytes existing at specific locations in an executable would merely corrupt the file and fail.
To get around the frequent changes, at last Mr_Stop resorted to emulating the DRM scheme with his own launcher rather than modifying original executables to remove it. Coincidentally, this launcher emulator was compiled to 32 bits, therefore also working around the 16-bit problem on modern 64-bit editions of Windows.
Plug this DRM emulator into the Hyperbowl game directory, enable Compatibility Mode, and voila: the full set of lanes is available in its original form on Windows 11!
Download
To play Hyperbowl: Arcade Edition on modern editions of Windows, simply download my pre-packaged version of the game, extract to any folder of your liking, and run INSTALL.bat. This will configure compatibility settings and optionally create Start Menu shortcuts.
While optional, I have also thrown in a copy of dgVoodoo 2 in case your GPU drivers don't properly support DirectX 8.0. You can also use dgVoodoo to improve fullscreen switching, force higher rendering resolutions, and other enhancements.
