Space Cadet Pinball has a special place in the hearts of many Windows enthusiasts. A customer used their support contract to ask how to change among the three levels of play in Space Cadet Pinball. My proudest achievement of Windows XP was fixing the game so it didn’t consume 100% CPU. People keep asking if it can be brought back.
One point of contention is over my claim that I removed Pinball from Windows because I couldn’t get the 64-bit version to work. Retrocomputing enthusiast NCommander even undertook a Zapruder-level analysis of all of the 64-bit versions of Windows he could find to prove or disprove my story.
I was amazed at the level of thoroughness (and the fortitude it required to get those Itanium systems up and running, much less debug them), but there’s one version of 64-bit Windows that NCommander didn’t try out, and that’s the one that’s relevant to the story.
This story and investigation into Space Cadet Pinball is wild. At this point we seem to have a pretty complete picture of its entire history, but it too some serious digging to get there.
Some months ago I watched the video by the Microsoft programmer “Dave’s Garage” who did the Windows port from the original Maxis Full Tilt Pinball. (I forget if it was a DOS or Amiga or other port and I’m not watching it again to find out.) It looks like “NCommander” is a wet behind the ears trying to earn some rep with a reaction video. He claims to have done it first which can be true but he published last. “NCommander” also gets a bit argumentative in his own comments about who is telling the whole truth. He’s yet another one with too much testosterone between his ears.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThxdvEajK8g
The short version is according to Dave the game would need a complete rewrite from the original ported code which wasn’t practically possible and he explains why. The code is “great but write once” code full of programming magic to get it to work. It’s not a task which was worth the effort which is why Raymond Chen gave up. Could they have done it? Yes but it hit the “inverse square law” very fast and rewriting the project would have been a big project in its own right.
Dave also has a few videos with some very good comments on coding (and portability) which people on this blog would benefit from watching if they weren’t too busy waving their “male privilege” around like a badge.
HollyB,
Thanks for the additional video link, it adds another relevant developer perspective.
I find it funny that people are actually doing detective work on this game from the 90s. It’s interesting to see how the game went through different hands at microsoft and yet they weren’t completely aware of each others porting efforts for the same game. It gives an impression of chaos. Raymond and Dave were evidently unaware of the 64bit itanium build. I find it hilarious that they didn’t allocate resources to port it to x86_64, but they did port it to mips and itanium.
It’s unfortunate that it’s not open source though, even if microsoft doesn’t doesn’t want to put in the effort to port it, it’s very likely that someone in the FOSS community would and make it better.
Alfman,
There is actually *one more* developer in the saga.
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/space-cadet-pinball-for-windows-95-recompiled-for-linux-running-on-windows-11-as-a-linux-app-under-wslg
Scott Hanselman shared the de-compiled, and cleaned up version of Space Cadet: https://github.com/k4zmu2a/SpaceCadetPinball . Given it was blessed by a Microsoft manager, I would assume the code is okay to use. He even recompiled it under Linux and ran it on WSL / Windows in the Linux container in that blog post.
Also Space Cadet can run on 64 bit Windows fine: https://www.groovypost.com/howto/windows-7-3d-pinball-space-cadet-game/
It is a shame a big part of history of Windows is being left in obscure blog posts needing scavenger hunts.
sukru,
It doesn’t strictly imply that he or anyone else has microsoft’s blessing to use it. I think it was in David Plummer’s video he said that not even microsoft was allowed to publish the code under it’s license. On the one hand, what’s the likelihood anyone cares about this? But developers have faced legal challenges for less. Look at the freecraft project independently creating a new portable engine for warcraft game files. People who owned the game could import and use the resources of the original game. Blizzard shut them down with a cease and desist.
https://everything2.com/title/FreeCraft
Nevertheless it’s interesting that this all exists! This developer on the “64 bit bug”…
The origin of the 64 bit bug is quite the mystery, Someone would need microsoft’s copy of the code to say definitely where/when it got introduced. Or maybe it was a compiler bug, in which case no one would get the bug today using a modern compiler.
Not only that but I’m finding that over the years a lot of my bookmarks go nowhere. Not just from obscure blogs either, but with big news sites that eventually take down the original content. Because of this I think there would be merit in having a bookmarking feature to save the original content. Alas it costs lots of money to host historic content and much of it isn’t effectively monetized. Archive.org is really ambitious to do what they do but I think modern bloated content present huge challenges for archivists to say nothing of video. This happens on youtube as well. For better or worse youtube is not a permanent archive.
Alfman,
Yes, it is not unexpected from Blizzard to interfere. They have unfortunately moving on the wrong direction. Btw, it seems like FreeCraft is now available under a new name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratagus
On preservation, it is a tough challenge.
There is an entire “data hoarder” community that tries to archive things before they get lost. However seeking out random Reddit users to get an older GeoCities cite is probably not the best way of doing it.
And society rules will interfere with it. There is the whole “right to be forgotten” saga. They might have something embarrassing of themselves posted on GeoCities, which people might not want to distribute. They might take down source code on GitHub to go private. They might delete their channels on YouTube.
I am not sure how to reconcile personal need to privacy vs historical need for preservation. Not to mention, somebody has to pay for the infrastructure.
And as you said, archive.org is probably the best we can have at the moment.
Oh right, David Plummer, the asshole that earned his money by illegally screwing Windows users with scareware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Plummer_(programmer)
That David Plummer that claims Linus Thorvalds distributes secret code as a blob with Linux to scare people away from it: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/rb2xzk/dave_plummer_aka_daves_garage_former_microsoft/
That David Plummer is certainly a great source for infotainment!
Ford Prefect,
Haha, I didn’t know any of that,
I don’t know if you meant that sarcastically, but I think there’s some truth in people who are dicks getting more clicks. For example if someone like Gordon Ramsay was a nice normal person, he wouldn’t attract the same attention and he wouldn’t have a show. For better or worse, abrasiveness is a proven way of getting views and somehow even winning presidential elections apparently.
Come on, he has autism, that may explain : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ9X5DSnVms
I never understood why Microsoft didn’t ship the 32-bit executable of Space Cadet Pinball in 64-bit versions of Windows.
“there’s one version of 64-bit Windows that NCommander didn’t try out”
very inconvenient then that we *cant* try this version, so we can never explore it..
It would be good if MS could be convinced to release some of the alpha 64bit builds just for historical curiosity as the first 64bit port of windows. Perhaps then someone could debug the issue in more detail. I recall the alpha compiler for windows being quite buggy at the time, so perhaps a compiler bug is the cause rather than the pinball code itself – and hence why it worked on later 64bit architectures.