It's so cool that we keep playing the games we "had to" (as they were what we have in the PC) when I was young. This week I've seen this guy do something I could never have when I was a child in this game:
Space Cadet Pinball on Linux
81–90 of 136 posts
Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux
#82I 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.
Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux
#83I 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.
kgliner's Hacker News comment from last time is cited on Wikipedia!
Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux
#84You 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.
I'd be curious to play a VR table, but the amount of tinkering required exceeds my curiosity.
Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux
#85I 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.
My first time using NT 4, I was setting up a bunch of machines that needed babysitting, and Space Cadet Pinball got me through a lot of long, boring nights.
I've thought back throughout my career to how lucky I was, it kept me from going crazy. Thank you!
Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux
#86It'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.
With game modding or decompilation, a lot of people do stuff that's probably illegal but whoever owns the rights doesn't care so they do it anyway. Microsoft is fairly hands off with old stuff like this that doesn't do any material damage to their bottom line. For a more serious example, the full leaked source code to Windows NT 4 and XP has been on Microsoft-owned Github for ages and they haven't bothered taking it down, probably because those versions have been out of support for over 10 years at this point.
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.
Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux
#87Cool! 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…
And the version from Full Tilt is a significantly enhanced version of the game. It has multiball, where the Windows bundled version doesn't.
i've gotten multiball in the Windows version of SpaceCadet, pretty sure I wasn't the victim of the Full Tilt version supply chain attack because while I knew about other tables I've never seen any of them.
Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux
#88I 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.
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?
Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux
#89I love this, I used to play this game a lot when I was bored at my brothers place, he only had a Windows computer.
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.
Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux
#90I'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…
I was a fan of "3D Ultra Pinball". You have to keep smacking that glider!
This was referenced at the bottom of the linked article.
And yeah, I'm a big fan, too. I still have the CDs for it, and it still runs in Windows 11!