Old-School Marble Player

Hi!

Dunno if any of you remember Atari's Marble Madness arcade video game from 1984, but that's where I started being a marble head. Pinball player since 1971, which probably helped.

I've been trying to get my old copy of Marble Blaster up and running again on this Windows 7 laptop and it's stuttering very badly.
What's the best way to get things up and running? Fire this up through DOSBox? Tried compatibility modes and got the same results.

Thanks very muchly. Once I get a job I'll probably get the new versions.

Steve

Hey welcome to the forums!

A lot of us use windows 7 through 10 on this place, and we can run marble blast just fine. Make sure you go into options and switch the device to run using the OpenGL driver. That should give you a very big performance boost!

Let me know if I can further assist you. Welcome again!

Jeff

Hey welcome

Like jeff said, windows 7 should be fine. I was running it on windows XP until recently and it worked acceptably.

Welcome among us, and enjoy your stay!

Welcome to the forums!
If you have Marble Blaster, you might want to get MBG, which is a later version with more levels, and you can download it here. Not advertising.

EDIT:
MBG was taken off the site... Nevermind.

Welcome to the forums! I'm sure you're find something to entertain yourself here!

Hello again!

Oh, I know you're not advertising. It's a related product and not unwanted.

So I've been poking about in the directories and I see that the OpenGL driver (openGL2d3d.dll, I assume) dates back to 2004. I'm gonna make a leap here and guess this is part of my problem.

I've looked in the C++ scripts and can't find anything to reconfigure to point MB to the updated drivers. I saw in a few other threads here to attach my console.log file, so I'm doing that just in case.

Any ideas? Thanks very muchly!

Hello!

Did you happen to check in the in-game options menu? There should be a way to enable OpenGL acceleration in there instead of Direct3D. That DLL file is fine, it simply translates the opengl calls to direct3d7 (which is why the game is so slow for you at the moment). You shouldn't have to mess around with any files.

Reply back if you're still having trouble, I'll try to assist as much as I can.

Thanks!

Hello.

Well, I'll give that a try. Just loaded the Marble Blast Gold and it's running just as slow as Marble Blast. So that's a clue.

It doesn't seem to matter if I use OpenGL or DirectX, it runs at the same speed.

The MBG demo doesn't seem to have any way to exit the program other than invoking the Task Manager to shut it down. It bounces back and forth between the start panel and the nag screen.

From the console.log you posted:

OpenGL driver information:
Vendor: Microsoft Corporation
Renderer: GDI Generic
Version: 1.1.0

You need to download and update your graphics driver. Right now, marble blast is saying that you do not have a OpenGL driver from your hardware vendor. GDI Generic is the software renderer that microsoft has.

Well, I got updated drivers. No change. Tried reinstalling them. Nope. Got the new version of glew. Nothing, but I couldn't find anywhere to patch those in either.
It won't change from the drivers mentioned above, even when told to use OpenGL from the options.
Looks like it's a hardware problem and the only thing to do is get a new computer.
Thanks anyways for your help!
Steve