First time since '09, I took a quick look at SDL-Ball, the awesome people maintaining the AUR package had made patches and a .desktop file, and I decided it was time to include those into the main release. I took the opportunity to also tweak the settings..
Unknown to most, SDL-Ball comes with background-images, and particle-system collision/response, but those features were turned off in the previous releases, to reduce cpu and gpu load and make SDL-Ball more playable on low-end systems), however, I think it's okay to include them now.
If anyone should be annoyed by these things being turned on as default, enter the game, go to settings, toggle the eye-candy setting off-on to produce a .config/sdl-ball/settings.ini file and turn off the background/collision detection from there.
There is no new content in SDL-Ball 1.02, so if you already have 1.01, you won't find anything of interest there. But now the "official" upstream package compiles again ;)