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Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

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Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#91

Post by mrandish »

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…

+1 on Visual Pinball, it's really mind-blowingly great and supported by a huge, very active community of artists and table developers. For anyone who doesn't yet know, there are hundreds of high-quality tables with a dozen or more new releases every week. While there are new, original tables which do things no physical pinball table can, many are lovingly hand-crafted recreations of commercial pinball machines including all the legendary classics from the 1950s to the 2000s. Any table you remember from your teen years is very probably already emulated.

Much like the MAME project is preserving arcade games before they are lost, the VPin community is doing historical preservation so future generations can enjoy these electro-mechanical machines. Under the hood in Visual Pinball the pinball machine ROMs are emulated by a special version of MAME called PinMAME, while Visual Pinball does the 3D rendering and physics simulation.

The majority of users play VPin on desktop with a keyboard but in the same way some MAME players add dedicated arcade buttons and joysticks or even a dedicated arcade cabinet, VPin supports running in a cabinet which looks like a pinball machine but has a flat-screen where the playfield would be as well as flipper buttons and a real plunger to launch the virtual ball.

VPin supports stereo sound but can also use the extra channels from a standard PC sound card's 7.1 output to drive effects like a subwoofer, bass shaker and up to four channels of positional haptic feedback for realism you don't just hear but feel. I was shocked at how accurately the transducers recreate the feel of real pinball bumpers and slingshots firing inside the cabinet down to the subtle vibration of a metal ball rolling across a wood playfield. In my cabinet I even added flipper solenoids from a pinball machine under the screen where the flippers are rendered. I can vouch for the net effect feeling authentic since my VPin cab sits in our game room next to 8 real pinball machines and a custom MAME arcade cab.

If you're interested in trying out Visual Pinball I strongly recommend starting with the Pinup Popper auto-installer that @eahm linked above (https://nailbuster.com/wikipinup/doku.php). All of this amazing goodness is the result of several different projects which work seamlessly together but installing it all in the right order and places can be confusing the first-time. Having to actually RTFM a bit to do my first install was slightly annoying but I now realize not being one-click user friendly is an upside. It keeps the VPin hobby in that ideal zone where it's just complex enough to limit drive-by casuals from mob spamming an otherwise super-fun, completely free, retro-adjacent hobby and that's why there's still a highly-engaged, knowledgeable community.

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#93

Post by davidst »

ndiddy wrote: post #88
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.

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 of anecdotes and the story on Wikipedia is both incomplete and incorrect in some ways. One day, I'll get around to editing it.

My memory is of promising it would be ready in time for Windows 95's launch, working excessively long hours, and focussing hard to make it fast enough so it would be fun to play on the minimum hardware requirement for Microsoft Plus.

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#94

Post by Randomno »

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…

Have you read the Wikipedia page recently? It was less complete a couple of years ago

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#95

Post by luqtas »

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.

have you followed their build instructions? https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball/blob/standalone/standal...

last time i tried on Debian it just worked... their developer testing app also works flawlessly on Android. Arch Linux has an AUR package with the last git and i updated it yesterday and played a bit before bed

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#96

Post by davidst »

Randomno wrote: post #94
davidst wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you read the Wikipedia page recently? It was less complete a couple of years ago

I looked at it today and it is more fleshed out but still incorrect. For example:

> In 1994, the company began development of a port of Doom.

No, we were never porting Doom and we used none of Doom's code or resources. And I didn't propose to tone down the violence. The game was intended to be a fun first-person shooter in the same spirit as Doom but that was the only connection.

Microsoft was involved in a high-profile antitrust suit with the Department of Justice at the time. They were understandably sensitive about the potential PR impact of this type of game shipping with Windows and proposed gameplay design changes to reduce the violence.

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#97

Post by anthk »

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.

There's openrw which doesn't use re3 code.

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#98

Post by mrandish »

eahm wrote: post #76
freeqaz wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yeah, I hear you but as I mentioned in my reply to your other post there is a long-term silver-lining to having a bit of onboarding complexity. I think it's a big reason the VPin community is well into its second decade and still full of passionately committed contributors freely sharing awesome stuff. If you want drive-by casual pinball there are reasonably-priced pinball systems on PS5/XBox/Switch and Steam that are quite good. While VPin has gotten much easier in recent years, it's still a hobby that requires active engagement. VPin rewards that effort by enabling unbelievably high-quality, flexibility, customization, community enhancements and an ever-growing library of amazing content that'll take years to explore.

I think the mismatch is when people see all these awesome pinball games "Fer Free!" and assume they're going to click Install and be playing in a couple minutes. I tell my friends to expect at least a half-hour before first play - and that they'll have to read and follow a couple pages of good (but not perfect) instructions to understand and configure a few different tools. If you want things to work reliably:

* Stick to only Visual Pinball (not older emulators like Future Pinball).

* Install it with Pinup Popper and set up your screen mapping and controls based on one of the standard default configs.

* Run tables released or updated relatively recently (3 yrs or so).

* Run tables from well-known release groups and authors (like Visual Pinball Workshop).

* Wait to run newly released tables until they've been out a month, have >200 of downloads and >20 positive reviews.

* Don't run add-ons which mod tables until you're experienced.

And once you're past the install phase and have a bunch of tables fully working with all the bells and whistles you want, there's a new tool called VPin Studio that's great for maintaining your VPin system https://github.com/syd711/vpin-studio.

Re Linux: I've only ever run VPin on Windows. I've seen posts from happy people who run it on Linux so apparently it can work very well but cross-platform is newer so there's less info on it. On Windows getting a full VPin install working is just a little cantankerous but no worse than you'd expect when you realize it's several open source hobby projects which pass data in various ways and aren't usually directly tested together.

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#99

Post by nottorp »

nottorp wrote: post #78
alberto-m wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

How this worked for printed news back in the dark ages was:

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?

Re: Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

#100

Post by nosrepa »

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…

The CEO refutes that they were working on doom elsewhere in this thread.
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