You are welcome people! Let me know if you can make it work!
By the way, investigating a little in the archives and folders inside of the game I have some conclusions:
-Folder
"levels": contains 3 folders that have the levels archives (mostly of them ".pal" archives I assume they came from "pallette", and a ".bmp" of the playfield itself), an alternative flu and bessie skins and 2 new marbles (smith and marbletest, which probably were for testing purposes), a ".bmp" of a playfield9 that wasn't included in the demo, and some more ".bmp" of the playfield8 that I think they forgot to delete while they were developing that level (just like the other images files they left there).
-Folder
"sounds": it has a lot of sound effects in ".wav" format that are not part of the game, and some of them have an embedded information that are of the "Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95", I recomend listen to the "james" files, they have a nice groove
-Folder "marbles": It contains all the ".bmp" files of all the marbles skins (where the only image of this game that can be found on internet was made), and the in-game icons and victory animations
-And a
"marbles.mmb" file (about 11MB) which I changed to ".exe" so the game would work. The curious thing is that I extracted this ".exe" with 7zip and now I have a few more archives that are interesting to look at:
".data": I oppened this file with the notepad, and between a lot of jeroglifics I distinguish what looks like a C code header file (".h"), because it has error messages, some macros, some including paths and archives, and a lot of functions prototypes.
".edata": not much to say but a "marbles.exe" word.
".idata": A lot of functions prototypes, but this time are for calling windows functions or for the directx (I think here is the key for making the game to work, maybe its something missing).
".rdata": Nothing important but this line "Manic Marbles GUI Skeleton (C) Gray Matter Inc. 1996", I think that's the developing program they used or the engine of the game or something. Worth to look after. Edit: I've just found out that that line is the label the game windows has. Edit2: I'm starting to think that "GUI skeleton" means somekind of "Prototype Graphic User Interface", so maybe the soul of the game isn't here.
".reloc": incomprehensible
".rsrc_1": most of it is empty (which is weird because it's a heavy file), but it has 3 rows of text, I think is some kind of header file because it mentions a lot of functions prototypes of windows, directx and some archives paths
".text": I think this has the source code of the game, because even though it's not readable with the windows notepad, it has some kind of C-code format
And at last, a folder named
".rsrc": Here is the most resources of the game (the menues, the sound effects, the music, the graphic buttons, the screens, etc.). I let you check this folder by your self
So that's all I can find out right now, I know I written a lot, but it's less than it appears! I think that someone who knows something about programming video games or aplications can easily apply inverse engineering to this game! PLEASE, HELP THIS TO HAPPEN! IT'S A NICE GAME AND IT'S WORTH THE SHOOT!
Other thing, most of the files in the demo are dated 22/08/1996 , and the game was supposed to reach its final retail version in spring of 1997, I assume this was about a year later, so I think that maybe the developers keep developing a little before cancelling the game, so if we can contact the Gray Matter Inc.'s team that were making the game maybe we can find out what the other levels were going be or some of the other features, so if someone wants to keep developing the game, at least they have a kick-start. Well, maybe I'm thinking out loud
hehe
That's all for now!
Like always, sorry if a have some spelling or grammatical errors!
Have a nice day, thanks for reading and greetings!
Fernando
haha! But there's only one problem and is that everythings works fine, but when the match starts it looks like distortionated or something, try it yourself and you will see:
, but please don't cut it out!
