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Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

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Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#111

Post by pabs3 »

Asooka wrote: post #66
flossly wrote: post #26

I like the authors remark on "source code FLOSS escrow" at the bottom of the article. 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).…

I honestly do not think source code will be all that useful. Make it so redistribution, decompilation, reverse-engineering and reimplementation is legal after sales stop and that covers it.

Why wouldn't the source code be useful?

You might need old binaries to build it, but shove those in a VM and you should be good to go. If they used Debian, then they could even publish the exact snapshot.debian.org date to download the binaries from, and which binaries.

Perhaps they had proprietary dependencies they couldn't get the code released for, but then you could port the source code to open equivalents.

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#112

Post by alex1138 »

eterm wrote: post #6

I'm always surprised at the nostalgia for Space Cadet Pinball. 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 lik…

It had a "plot". You "upgraded weapons"

...also it was what you played when you had no internet

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#113

Post by WorldMaker »

adito wrote: post #14

I was wondering why newer OS doesn't bundle games with their default installation anymore? Even on smartphone. I remember on old dumb phone (nokia I think), you can play snake and some racing game. It even has multiplayer via bluetooth.

Space Cadet (Pinball) has the most direct answer: it was written largely in x86 assembler and didn't survive a 64-bit translation attempt. Raymond Chen says the ball would ghost off the table, fall down and end the game in seconds when trying to run in 64-bit math. Raymond even takes personal responsibility for the failure to keep Space Cadet alive and disappointment it didn't survive past Windows XP:

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkadium

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#114

Post by unixhero »

davidst wrote: post #82

I am one of the original authors of Space Cadet Pinball and I just want to say it is absolutely wonderful there are people who love our old pinball game enough to keep it alive. You made my day. 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.

As you of course know, since it was bundled with the default install of Windows 2000, we all had in our computer labs. It was a nice break from reality, an evergreen gamer and user experience. Eventually people brought Deluxe Skijump, Doom and Starcraft, but Space Cadet was still a viable option.

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#115

Post by x______________ »

davidst wrote: post #82

I am one of the original authors of Space Cadet Pinball and I just want to say it is absolutely wonderful there are people who love our old pinball game enough to keep it alive. You made my day. 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.

It is (an understatement to say) with great honor to have the opportunity to tell you (and indirectly the team if they read this): Thank You for making possibly one of the greatest Windows selling points ever, the inclusion of Space Cadet Pinball into its base offering.

SCP has had such a massive influence in my life up to the point of getting into the real world of pinball and becoming semi-professional (or the step prior as pro pinball doesn't exist in this part of the world, yet..).

I've been wanting to ask this forever and until this morning, would have thought I'd have brought this question to my grave:

Would you ever consider going back to the drawing board in an attempt to produce an official follow-up to Space Cadet Pinball?

There are a few generations of people who may be yearning for nostalgia in a world of enshittification, micro-transactions and even worse in the virtual pinball scenes, licensing bullshit that never favors the player.

Disclaimer: I've possibly put too much thought into this already, am willing to put everything I have into this if ever needed... but will need to let you comment first :)

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#116

Post by ramenat2am »

andai wrote: post #4

Cool! I checked out the GitHub: https://github.com/k4zmu2a/SpaceCadetPinball It's been ported to a whole bunch of consoles. There's also a browser version! https://pinball.alula.me/ 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 someth…

I wonder if they didn't bundle Doom with Windows 95 because, by those days' standards, it was a pretty scary and violent game, and they didn't want to deal with any possible backlash?

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#117

Post by aa-jv »

x______________ wrote: post #115
davidst wrote: post #82

I am one of the original authors of Space Cadet Pinball and I just want to say it is absolutely wonderful there are people who love our old pinball game enough to keep it alive. You made my day. 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.

It is (an understatement to say) with great honor to have the opportunity to tell you (and indirectly the team if they read this): Thank You for making possibly one of the greatest Windows selling points ever, the inclusion of Space Cadet Pinball into its base offering. SCP has had such a massive influence in my life up to the point of getting into the real world of pinball and becoming semi-professional (or the step…

Fellow pinball enthusiast here - I didn't get into it because of SCP, though, but rather grew up with the machines being regularly rotated and maintained in my Dads hamburger shop in the 70's .. halcyon days indeed!

What part of the world are you in that doesn't have a professional pinball tournament roster? Just curious ..

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#118

Post by aa-jv »

diegomacario wrote: post #32

Last year we shipped a pinball game at Shopify that took some inspiration from Space Cadet. You can still play it here: https://bfcm.shopify.com/ 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 fu…

I'm in the middle of a DIY pinball project - all design work and analysis at the moment, including getting a BARRACORA table for a few months to serve as inspiration.

Got any tips and tricks for budding pinball designers? Maybe some notes that didn't make it yet .. ?

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#120

Post by mghackerlady »

davidst wrote: post #93
ndiddy wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a fun game bundled with every Windows install was really something special, so thanks for working on the game and selling it to Microsoft. Without it, we wouldn't have been able to have a Pinball league in my middle school typing class :) What parts of the game did you work on? Do you have any fun anecdotes about your time working on it, or stories about hard to find bugs?

I was CEO of Cinematronics (to be clear, we were a tiny startup so a CEO title didn't mean much - everyone pitched in wherever they could help.) I negotiated the contract with Microsoft. My engineering contribution was not in the gameplay itself but in the game's memory manager and low-level rendering code. That was all performance-critical X86 assembly. I doubt any of that code lives on today. Yes, there were a lot…

Wikipedia editor here! It would be much better to write a blog post or something, as anything you add will be removed as unsourced original research
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