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Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

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Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#51

Post by Randomno »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #39
s20n wrote: post #38

It's ridiculous how accurate this recreation is to the original, it looks and feels identical. 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.

My understanding is you had to NOT look at the disassembled code for a project but have someone else do so and document what they see and that constitutes clean room. Course if I make Claude do the same thing… write a spec from disassembled code, that could work.

Yes this isn't clean-room. Though none of these decompilation projects have been resolved in court yet. re3 (GTA3/Vice City decompilation) developers were sued by Take Two but they settled out of court.

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#52

Post by toast0 »

stavros wrote: post #49
toast0 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you drain to the far left, and kickback is lit, the ball gets sent along the line and comes out the top (and IIRC, refills your fuel?)

Oh that whole thing is a higher level! I see now, I thought that top section is actually a ground section, thanks.

The purple thing is an overlay... There's the ramp, the three lanes (with lights), three blue mini pop bumpers, and then the ball drops into the inlane for the left flipper.

The kickback puts the ball into the left orbit, which is at ground level, the ball will hit the spinner and then IIRC cause it's outside the crop, it goes into the lanes at the top of the playfield, and into the pop bumper area there.

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#53

Post by anamexis »

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).…

It's not quite FLOSS escrow, but source code escrow is somewhat common among big enterprise software contracts. There are companies that facilitate this, e.g. https://www.escrowcompany.co/source-code-escrow/

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#55

Post by MegaDeKay »

unleaded wrote: post #8

The Full Tilt version also has multiball which is missing from the Windows version. Lock a ball by shooting into a wormhole where the two lights are the same color, lock 3 balls to start. 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…

> I think it's Windows only though (very, tables are all scripted in VBScript and PinMAME is loaded as a COM object).

Fortunately for us, you're wrong :-)

VPX now runs on Linux, Mac, iOS, and Android. And it runs great on those platforms thanks to some pioneering work by the dev jsm174. The VBScript bits are handled using just enough Wine to make it happen but the rest of it is all native. Surround sound feedback (SSF), the Direct Output Framework (DOF), Pinup Popper packs (PUP Packs) etc are all supported as well. The GUI that used to be Windows only is now built into Windows / Mac / Linux versions via ImGUI and can be brought up live during play.

If you want to try it out, log into Github and download the latest action for your platform [0]. Most non-Windows users will want to use the latest version in master as this brings the most amount of parity to the Windows version compared to the 10.8.0 release last year. Use the BGFX version as that has the new multithreaded rendering backend that supports Metal and Vulkan. If you want to learn more, best to check out the Virtual Pinball Chat Discord [1] or poke around the wiki [2].

The devs have been putting in a lot of work to generally make VPX cross platform and it shows. I have built my own Pincab [3] based on it and its amazing.

*Edit*: Should have mentioned that VPX is now supported by Batocera as well, though the VPX version in there is getting a bit long in the tooth.

[0] https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball/actions/workflows/vpinb...

[1] https://discord.gg/BhR9h5aWm

[2] https://github.com/dekay/vpinball-wiki/wiki/About-Visual-Pin...

[3] https://github.com/dekay/vpin-cabinet/

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#56

Post by flossly »

anamexis wrote: post #53
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).…

It's not quite FLOSS escrow, but source code escrow is somewhat common among big enterprise software contracts. There are companies that facilitate this, e.g. https://www.escrowcompany.co/source-code-escrow/

Did not know that... Thanks.

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#57

Post by willis936 »

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.

That would be doing something nice for the user at the expense of doing slightly less funneling traffic to their app store where they make their money on adtech and access fees.

We wouldn't want to leave any money on the table in the pursuit of a better product, would we?

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#58

Post by prmoustache »

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…

Honestly my favorite pinball game of all time is not at all realistic: Devil Crush (I think it was called Devil Crash in the USA). It has been released on both the pcengine and the megadrive. For some reason I tend to prefer the pcengine more despite the graphics quality being a bit below, probably because of the more "dirty" sounding soundtrack. This is my main occupation when I am flying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-7iC8z6q8s&t=7

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#59

Post by sakjur »

chungy wrote: post #33
stavros wrote: post #9

Space Cadet wasn't bundled with Windows, was it? It was included in Microsoft Plus! 98 but not Windows 98.

It was actually part of Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95. It wasn't directly available for Windows 98 at all, but the Windows 98 install disc does include an INF file so you can install it, provided you have a copy of Plus! for Windows 95. 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.

Raymond Chen has two blog posts that first describes why Space Cadet was removed because of a 64-bit rounding mode bug and then a follow-up post a decade later clarifying that that might not be the full story.

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...

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#60

Post by pipes »

Randomno wrote: post #51
giancarlostoro wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is you had to NOT look at the disassembled code for a project but have someone else do so and document what they see and that constitutes clean room. Course if I make Claude do the same thing… write a spec from disassembled code, that could work.

Yes this isn't clean-room. Though none of these decompilation projects have been resolved in court yet. re3 (GTA3/Vice City decompilation) developers were sued by Take Two but they settled out of court.

https://www.pcgamer.com/take-two-dismisses-lawsuit-against-g...

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.

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