I am forwarding this post to my Cinematronics co-founders and friends, Mike Sandige (lead engineer) and Kevin Gliner (designer and product manager). They will enjoy seeing this as much as I did.
The author was able to do this just decompiling the exe files, without looking at the original source code. Basically, completely blind.
So it goes without saying: The deaf, dumb and blind kid sure makes a mean pinball.
edit: It does! I installed the AUR version of it that was linked in the repo README and tested it out, and typing "hidden test" during the game startup sequence lets me drag the ball
You can see on this thread that the original developers of Space Cadet Pinball think this is a neat project so I don't see anything morally wrong either.
I didn't know about this. Not sure if the developers settled or take two gave up. I would guess the latter as the decompilation / port scene seems to be going strong. Though I don't follow it that closely.
https://github.com/k4zmu2a/SpaceCadetPinball
It's been ported to a whole bunch of consoles. There's also a browser version!
Also, turns out Space Cadet Pinball is part of a bigger Maxis game I never heard of: Full Tilt! Pinball.
Also turns out we almost got DOOM bundled with Window 95! (GLUEM) but it was rejected: "Can't we just get a game of pinball or something like that?" And here we are :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Tilt!_Pinball#Development
Every year we ship a live visualization of our merchant's sales on Black Friday. For a long time it was just a globe with arcs where each arc shows a real sale going from seller to buyer, but in the last few years we have been transforming the website into something more fun and interactive.
I found programming a pinball machine to be quite challenging. We were a team of 2 engineers and 1 artist and we worked on that project for about a month and a half. We wrote some notes on the process and put them in the desktop computer next to the pinball machine if anyone is curious about how things work.
It's prolly hard to achieve legally, but the idea that a software is close source until it's no longer sold then automatically becomes open source would attract me as a potential user/buyer of the software: less lock-in in the worst-case scenario (being fully dependent on it wile company goes bust or decides to cancel the project).
Reminds me a bit of the https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/
<<The "social contract" ensuring Qt remains open-source is primarily maintained through the KDE Free Qt Foundation, established in 1998. This agreement guarantees that if The Qt Company ever fails to release an open-source version, or if the Qt project is neglected, the foundation has the right to release Qt under a BSD-style license.>>
If you enjoy playing Space Cadet I would really recommend giving Visual Pinball a try. There are so many more pinball games better than Space Cadet, with amazing tables people have made for them all available for free. I think it's Windows only though (very, tables are all scripted in VBScript and PinMAME is loaded as a COM object).
As an aside I tried to hack around with this and found out the programming for Space Cadet is pretty awful (not to disparage them or anything, it works). The state of the lights directly reflects the game state. (This is the cause of the bug where if you drain or start a mission while the rank-up light show is playing, you can skip a rank.)
Damn amazing how they are making these pinballs today.
More tables here too:
https://vpforums.org/index.php?app=downloads&showcat=50
https://vpuniverse.com/files/category/82-vpx-pinball-tables
https://virtualpinballspreadsheet.github.io
I wouldn't mind at all if it was all just purely kept in a metaphorical locked vault, only to be opened after some special conditions regarding the support and lifespan of the software were met. Even if those terms were like, "only after the original copyright has expired", aka 70+ years, it would still be so much better for the state of preservation of source code over the current norms. We have games that have had their original source code lost in under a decade from their publication. (Kingdom Hearts 1) Any alternative is better than the current state of things.
I don't know, the incentives for creators are already low enough. Any book one writes lands immediately in Anna's Archive and is digested into LLM slop for the profit of Altman & Co. Any piece of investigative journalism, when shared here or on Reddit, sees a link to some paywall-bypass site as one of the most upvoted comments. So we are already in a Bastiat's window situation where people are disincentivized to produce creative work. I'd rather not put the work of software creators even more at risk of being cheaply copied and copyright laundered: any state vault would be an easy target for trillion-dollar corporations.
Aside, as someone doing retro reverse engineering I greatly appreciate the author's words about the tension between software preservation and the need to reward creators for their work.
That is generally because they're on random sites that want you to subscribe for a year to read the one piece that was mentioned on the sites you read... not going to happen, sorry.
A friend told you about an article, or a headline piqued your interest.
You could anonymously hand a negligible payment (few cents or dollars in cash) to an intermediary (the newspaper seller at the street corner) to get access to all the content published for a certain time period (daily/weekly/monthly issue of the publication).
Now a "friend" (for example a HN post) still tells you about an article. Unfortunately you can't get an issue, they want an ongoing commitment. It's not anonymous, you have to create an account. The intermediaries are gone though, is that a good thing?
Just a few notes in the age of supply chain scares, don't install flatpak as root if you don't have to, and in this case you might want to use flatpak mask com.github.k4zmu2a.spacecadetpinball after installing, seeing as flatpak updates all its installed flatpaks otherwise. It's a project that hasn't seen updates in 2 years and really shouldn't see any updates considering its nature, so let's keep it that way.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160205141748/https://blogs.msd...
The larger answer to the rest of the games seems to be related: Windows trying to shrink its non-cross platform code "liabilities" and things it needed to translate between processor architectures. The games were never a priority for the Windows team. Most were either intern projects and/or contracted from "second party vendors". In Windows 8, Microsoft decided to completely contract all of the games to a second party, the strange and sometimes controversial Arkadium [1]. The Arkadium Solitaire and Minesweeper were installed by default for a while, but as Arkadium started injecting more ads and also quickly increasing the install sizes of the games, Microsoft did the natural thing and removed them as default installs so people would stop complaining about their size and/or ads and instead just adding shortcuts to install them from the Store.
We wouldn't want to leave any money on the table in the pursuit of a better product, would we?
(I can't imagine any other reason why, except maybe bug reports)
If the ball is coming straight down the middle, there's no choice but to tilt. A really good player will be able to tilt the tightest machine enough to get that ball to a flipper. Also, a really good player is better at judging "straight down the middle" and choosing not to tilt at all. Anybody who is reasonable at pinball can play for an infinite amount of time on a very loose machine.
It's not actually a factor that can be removed from pinball. You can't have machines tilting when people just lean against them, or when a player pushes a flipper button energetically. The owner has to pick some threshold. They're irredeemably physical games.
The sharp impulse won’t trigger the tilt mechanism, but it may displace the playfield just enough for the flipper to touch the ball when it otherwise wouldn’t. If all goes well the ball will deflect to the other (lowered) flipper, bounce off it, and allow you to continue play in front of your amazed friends.
Perhaps it was just chance that I grew up playing what seemed like a much better pinball game ( Hyper-3D Pinball, aka Tilt!* ), but I was always underwhelmed by Space Cadet Pinball on windows.
In reality they're both pretty similar, I just happened to play a lot of one before the other, but the full screen DOS experience was much richer than what felt like a much more flat and less 3D windows experience.
You can see some Hyper-3D Pinball / Tilt! gameplay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9ufwSkB0XQ
* Not to be confused with "Full Tilt!", from which space cadet pinball comes from.
I still applaud the Linux version for its hack value :)
Other pinball games are bland and boring to me.
And yeah, I'm a big fan, too. I still have the CDs for it, and it still runs in Windows 11!
It was also included with Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows Me, and Windows XP (both the original and x64 versions). Finally removed in Vista to never return.
It's a fun bit of Windows history trivia.
- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121218-00/?p=58... - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220106-00/?p=10...
