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Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

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Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#71

Post by vikingerik »

netsharc wrote: post #27
ahartmetz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming that it's about moving the ball unseen (which makes it much easier) from the sink hole higher on the table to the apparent ejection hole and kicker low on the table. One could have the ball go quite low below the table surface and then use some kind of mechanical kicker to get it up to table level again near the bottom. It's possibly a unique problem, but seems to be much less work than building the rest of…

Or just have a different ball ready to come out of the exit hole, the top hole would swallow ball 1, and a different ball could exit after a realistic delay... A bit like Star Trek teleportation.. is it you, or a copy of you?

Several real pinball tables do this, keep a hidden ball staged to make it seem to instantly reappear. The Rick & Morty machine in particular does this - you can shoot into a portal, and the ball (actually a different hidden one) reappears instantly some distance away.

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#73

Post by eahm »

You might want to check this one https://archive.org/details/vpinball-x-73-space-cadet for Visual Pinball https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball. There are others that might be even better but JP's is the one that just works without installing and configuring a bunch of other software (https://youtube.com/results?search_query=JP%27s+Space+Cadet - https://youtu.be/UXfohCzilrQ).

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

https://nailbuster.com/wikipinup

https://archive.org/search?query=visual+pinball+tables

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#74

Post by ahartmetz »

ahartmetz wrote: post #17
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…

Pinball Dreams first on a friend's Amiga and then my PC for me, later Pro Pinball. Space Cadet was hopeless garbage in comparison. Space Cadet had a boring table, much worse graphics and sound, and terrible ball physics. I still applaud the Linux version for its hack value :)

After watching a video, it seems like I misremembered the ball physics, but the rest seems more or less correct. The sound effects sound really cheap, the music... exists, and in the lower center of the table, there is... uh, a star-shaped gradient thing? That is usually where the most elaborate graphics of the table are! Like a cool spaceship or the space cadet or evil aliens or whatever.

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#75

Post by freeqaz »

eahm wrote: post #73

You might want to check this one https://archive.org/details/vpinball-x-73-space-cadet for Visual Pinball https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball . There are others that might be even better but JP's is the one that just works without installing and configuring a bunch of other software ( https://youtube.com/results?search_query=JP%27s+Space+Cadet - https://youtu.be/UXfohCzilrQ ). Damn amazing how they are making these…

I have struggled to get this project working on non-Windows. It just hangs and crashes no matter what I do or try on Linux/Mac. It's a very Windows-oriented project that's slowly losing the shackles right now.

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#76

Post by eahm »

freeqaz wrote: post #75
eahm wrote: post #73

You might want to check this one https://archive.org/details/vpinball-x-73-space-cadet for Visual Pinball https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball . There are others that might be even better but JP's is the one that just works without installing and configuring a bunch of other software ( https://youtube.com/results?search_query=JP%27s+Space+Cadet - https://youtu.be/UXfohCzilrQ ). Damn amazing how they are making these…

I have struggled to get this project working on non-Windows. It just hangs and crashes no matter what I do or try on Linux/Mac. It's a very Windows-oriented project that's slowly losing the shackles right now.

Not gonna lie, some tables require way too much work, every software today wants you to be an engineer with 20+ years of some specific experience, what about just double click and let me play the damn game?

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#77

Post by alberto-m »

cbondurant wrote: post #69

I like the idea mentioned of a source code escrow, and it feels like that would be a great place for national governments to step in. It reminds me of how the British Library requires that any published book have a copy sent to them for archival. Why not have similar laws in place for source code? If for no other reason than pure archival. I wouldn't mind at all if it was all just purely kept in a metaphorical locked…

> 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.

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#78

Post by nottorp »

alberto-m wrote: post #77
cbondurant wrote: post #69

I like the idea mentioned of a source code escrow, and it feels like that would be a great place for national governments to step in. It reminds me of how the British Library requires that any published book have a copy sent to them for archival. Why not have similar laws in place for source code? If for no other reason than pure archival. I wouldn't mind at all if it was all just purely kept in a metaphorical locked…

> 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 Basti…

> 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.

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.

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#79

Post by Sophira »

freeqaz wrote: post #75
eahm wrote: post #73

You might want to check this one https://archive.org/details/vpinball-x-73-space-cadet for Visual Pinball https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball . There are others that might be even better but JP's is the one that just works without installing and configuring a bunch of other software ( https://youtube.com/results?search_query=JP%27s+Space+Cadet - https://youtu.be/UXfohCzilrQ ). Damn amazing how they are making these…

I have struggled to get this project working on non-Windows. It just hangs and crashes no matter what I do or try on Linux/Mac. It's a very Windows-oriented project that's slowly losing the shackles right now.

It works fairly well for me in Linux on WINE, even with Visual PinMAME. I believe I used the all-in-one installer (vpx7setup.exe, although there's a later version now).

My GPU is an AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT, if that makes a difference.

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#80

Post by Sophira »

aykutseker wrote: post #42
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.

Clean room needs an independent second party with their own intent. An AI rewrite probably doesn't qualify, since its output traces directly to what it read.

Maybe it was edited, but from what I see, in the last sentence they said to have Claude make a spec, not to rewrite the code.
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