My name is BioBern (or Bernhard Kirsch in the real life) and I am a Marble Madness Fan. My Hiscore is 110.950 (MameAnalog+, single player game, two trackballs, difficulty very easy). You can contact me here. You can find more about me at bodenstaendig.de.

The first time I saw the arcade machine around 1985, I hardly believed my eyes. I played it, I loved it and I dreamed to be the Marble. I remember the days when I fought at the real thing together with my cousin. We were poor, sweaty and happy afterwards. Later, we also had the Amiga-conversion at home which was playable with two mice (one of them was a modified Atari Mouse), but this was nothing compared to the Original. These days are gone.

For a long time, I did not know where in Germany you can play the original. The "arcade culture" is developed very badly in Germany. Boring halls where you have to be 18 years old and only new games! In 1992, when I made a bicycle tour in England, I found a Marble Madness in a little village at the beach called "westward ho!". This was the last opportunity for me to play the original for a long time. Until April 2000, when some clever design students organized the Videogame-Rave "Zockdeluxe" in Bochum at Rampe17 (see below). Do you know other places where you can play the real Marble Madness today? In Germany? Write me!

What you still can do is to play an emulation on your PC. The Original Arcade game is much harder to play cause you need the power of your whole body to keep the large trackballs rolling.

That's me with a webcam, a laptop and a mirror. Most of the pictures here are taken with this webcam.

This is my friend Drax playing the real thing at the fantastic party Zockdeluxe in Bochum/Germany in February 2000. It was a techno party with classic Arcade games, videogame collectors, homecomputers and so on. Beside Marble Madness they had other Atari games like an original Asteroids from 1979. (No emulation can compete with its luminous, eye-blasting vectors).

We were so cool at the Zockdeluxe: A romantic still live with an Atari energy drink they sold there, an Atari Baseballcap and a polaroid with my scores. I absolutely do not know how this "DAK" made these scores of up to 180.000 points.
The Drax Gameboy-Galery has great GameboyCamera-photos from the Zockdeluxe

1999: Marble Madness at home with two trackballs (PS/2 and serial). In those days, I programmend my own screen-filling, arcade-like looking video mode for my Illama 8221E using Advance Mame for DOS, cause the tweak modes of Standard Mame did not work with this monitor.

Since early 2002, I use "MameAnalog+" for Windows 98/SE/ME with two USB-trackballs.
Since late 2003, I use the new WinXP build of "MameAnalog+" on my new computer. Nowadays, Mame's Direct3D filters can simulate the RGB-mask of an old arcade monitor. See "emulation" section for details about doing such things in your home.

Marble Madness on my girlfriend's old Pentium 90 computer. Look at her illuminated trackball that was sold ca. 1990-1998 under different labels for Atari ST, Amiga and PC (The original Marble Madness trackballs were illkuminated also).

Marble Madness on the road. My Fujitsu Biblo also works with two trackballs. People still look confused if you play in a pub.

Survival Marble Madness really rocks my world: This was one reason to buy a Pocket PC 2002 device. Now I always have the holy pixels with me. See "conversions" section for details.

If absolutely no other Marble Madness is in sight, I take my gameboy out of my survival kit. A suggestion to Nintendo: Why not make the next GameboyCamera eye movable in all directions, so that we can use it as a trackball. :-)