Marble Drop (1997) on Windows 10

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Introduction

Marble Drop is a 1997 puzzle game made by Maxis, the same company that later created The Sims.
The game supported Windows 3.1 and 95. Thankfully, the developers did not rely on Win16 support on Windows 95 and instead on the disk we can find both a Win16 and a Win32 version, which requires some fixing to work on modern systems.

The game has some issues with Windows 10:

  • The installer is 16-bit
  • The installer refuses to install on NT-based systems (XP and later are all NT-based)
  • The game refuses to start if some registry keys generated by the installer are missing
  • The game has some issues with window positioning and redrawing

What we need

  • Your Marble Drop CD. If you lost the disc or if you don't have a CD drive, you can get a disc image from the Internet Archive.

Installing the game

Insert the CD (or mount the downloaded image), and browse the files on it. Find a folder called Marble and open it. Inside, you'll see a folder called Win95; copy it to your C drive. Rename the Win95 folder on your C drive to just Marble.

Fixing the game

Download this archive, open it, and launch reg1.reg. Confirm everything. These are the registry keys that should be generated by the installer. Now enter the Marble folder on your C drive and copy the other 2 files into it. This launcher fixes the window positioning and redrawing issues. Right click launch.bat and make a shortcut on your desktop. Now go your desktop and find that shortcut, right click it and select properties. Change the icon Type C:\Marble\marble.exe and choose the first icon. Press OK and close everything, rename the shortcut to Marble Drop

Enjoy!

Launch Marble Drop and enjoy! Screenshot

Still not working?

Occasionally the game may still show display issues when it's launched, but it's very rare. if it happens, just move the window around or restart the game.
If the game is not working, leave a comment below and I'll try to help you or send you a prepatched version.

Credits

  • Cmdow, a command line utility to manipulate windows.

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