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.
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!
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.
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.
I remember in the original there was something you could type when the game was playing the starting sequence (I think it was "hidden test"?) to be able to move the ball with your cursor. I'm curious if this works in this version so I'll probably try it out later when I'm at a computer if no one else has.
edit: It does! I installed the AUR version of it that was linked in the repo README and tested it out, and typing "hidden test" during the game startup sequence lets me drag the ball
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 something like that?" And here we are :)
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
+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 with a passionate, knowledgeable community.
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 fun and interactive.
I found programming a pinball machine to be quite challenging. We were a team of 2 engineers and 1 artist and we worked on that project for about a month and a half. We wrote some notes on the process and put them in the desktop computer next to the pinball machine if anyone is curious about how things work.
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).
<<The "social contract" ensuring Qt remains open-source is primarily maintained through the KDE Free Qt Foundation, established in 1998. This agreement guarantees that if The Qt Company ever fails to release an open-source version, or if the Qt project is neglected, the foundation has the right to release Qt under a BSD-style license.>>
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/
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.
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 Windows only though (very, tables are all scripted in VBScript and PinMAME is loaded as a COM object).
As an aside I tried to hack around with this and found out the programming for Space Cadet is pretty awful (not to disparage them or anything, it works). The state of the lights directly reflects the game state. (This is the cause of the bug where if you drain or start a mission while the rank-up light show is playing, you can skip a rank.)
> 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.
I intuitively feel like more realistic games could be more fun, and that I might just have fondness for Space Cadet from growing up with it; but the more I played other pinball games the more I appreciate that space cadet is a simply great game to play, it feels great and there's a great variety of things to keep you hooked.
I wish I could find another pinball game I enjoyed as much. The closest experiences I could find are Xenotitle and Demon's Tilt but I found them harder to get into and get good at.
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 vault, only to be opened after some special conditions regarding the support and lifespan of the software were met. Even if those terms were like, "only after the original copyright has expired", aka 70+ years, it would still be so much better for the state of preservation of source code over the current norms. We have games that have had their original source code lost in under a decade from their publication. (Kingdom Hearts 1) Any alternative is better than the current state of things.
> 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.
> 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.
I 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.
Sooner or later I'll split the game from data so the second part will be easier, allowing custom flatpaks to extend data. The flatpak has received updates especially for keeping an up-to-date runtime but the upstream game, however, has not and Flathub will only show appstream data for the update. You can see on the flatpak manifest repo that latest commit is 6 months old: https://github.com/flathub/com.github.k4zmu2a.spacecadetpinb...
Many people have thought about this, IIRC it's not physically possible to build because there is a lane that goes under a bumper (which in real life they extend down quite a bit) https://files.catbox.moe/pnaeri.png
Pop bumpers on an elevated/overlay playfield seems like a nightmare in general, maintenance would be a big pain. I can't think of a machine that has a pop like that, but my internal pinball database is getting pretty dusty.
You might be able to make the kickback lane work with a subway or maybe make the machine a widebody and go around the mess?
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 the table.
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.
I think it's because the bumpers on top (the white things with the blue dot in the middle) need a lot of space underneath and the line runs through the space that they would need.
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.
I suggested this to a Stern employee 21 years ago, which obviously went nowhere. Back then they were trying to do a Halo machine, which also went nowhere.
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:
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?
Google play games comes with a offline copy of snake, solitaire, minesweeper, and a few others. I'm not sure if that's bundled with phones or not, and the games are kinda hidden. I only found out about them because they come up if you try to search Google play without a connection.
I remember kids begging their parents to play Brick Breaker on their parents blackberries. Of course this was before young children having iPads was normalized
That reminds me, do skilled players actually use the tilt keys? I remember being confused for years as to the purpose of tilt keys because I hadn't used a real pinball machine, and I can't remember it nudging the ball enough to merit the risk.
Yes tilting an actual pinball machine is very legitimate. On the other end, pinball machines have adjustable legs and the arcade owner will make adjustments to the machine to throw people off. Not daily, but when they notice someone is constantly earning free plays, they will take action. Any minor changes will cause the ball to take slightly different paths.
It's been forever since I played space cadet, but skillful nudging is beneficial in many video pinballs. A little nudge here and there helps save balls from the drain and can help make some shots.
All good pinball players tilt. Owners can make the machine "loose" or "tight" (at least that what we used to call it.) A loose machine allows a lot of tilting, and a tight one only allows slight nudges.
If the ball is coming straight down the middle, there's no choice but to tilt. A really good player will be able to tilt the tightest machine enough to get that ball to a flipper. Also, a really good player is better at judging "straight down the middle" and choosing not to tilt at all. Anybody who is reasonable at pinball can play for an infinite amount of time on a very loose machine.
It's not actually a factor that can be removed from pinball. You can't have machines tilting when people just lean against them, or when a player pushes a flipper button energetically. The owner has to pick some threshold. They're irredeemably physical games.
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 like a much more flat and less 3D windows experience.
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.
Yeah the Pro Pinball series cstarted arriving around the same time as Windows 95. I guess people liked the Windows game because it was just a few clicks away.
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.
It's really no surprise: it's a game that was pre-installed on hundreds of millions of computers. That's it. For people of a certain age it's very very likely they have played it, at least a bit.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
kgliner's Hacker News comment from last time is cited on Wikipedia!
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.
I remember in the original there was something you could type when the game was playing the starting sequence (I think it was "hidden test"?) to be able to move the ball with your cursor. I'm curious if this works in this version so I'll probably try it out later when I'm at a computer if no one else has.
edit: It does! I installed the AUR version of it that was linked in the repo README and tested it out, and typing "hidden test" during the game startup sequence lets me drag the ball
Just to note, Microsoft provides debug symbols for 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.
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.
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.
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.
Just need two AI for a second party.
That also was exposed to proprietary assets or binaries at some point during training
It's crazy that license laundering is still the primary use case for LLMs.
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 something like that?" And here we are :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Tilt!_Pinball#Development
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.
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
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
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?
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.
I'd be curious to play a VR table, but the amount of tinkering required exceeds my curiosity.
+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 with a passionate, knowledgeable community.
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 fun and interactive.
I found programming a pinball machine to be quite challenging. We were a team of 2 engineers and 1 artist and we worked on that project for about a month and a half. We wrote some notes on the process and put them in the desktop computer next to the pinball machine if anyone is curious about how things work.
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).
Reminds me a bit of the https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/
<<The "social contract" ensuring Qt remains open-source is primarily maintained through the KDE Free Qt Foundation, established in 1998. This agreement guarantees that if The Qt Company ever fails to release an open-source version, or if the Qt project is neglected, the foundation has the right to release Qt under a BSD-style license.>>
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.
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.
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 Windows only though (very, tables are all scripted in VBScript and PinMAME is loaded as a COM object).
As an aside I tried to hack around with this and found out the programming for Space Cadet is pretty awful (not to disparage them or anything, it works). The state of the lights directly reflects the game state. (This is the cause of the bug where if you drain or start a mission while the rank-up light show is playing, you can skip a rank.)
> 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/
I intuitively feel like more realistic games could be more fun, and that I might just have fondness for Space Cadet from growing up with it; but the more I played other pinball games the more I appreciate that space cadet is a simply great game to play, it feels great and there's a great variety of things to keep you hooked.
I wish I could find another pinball game I enjoyed as much. The closest experiences I could find are Xenotitle and Demon's Tilt but I found them harder to get into and get good at.
The next best thing imo is Yoku's Island Express.
I've played a lot of pinball. Space Cadet is a very good pinball game in terms of design, balance, and interest. I wouldn't short it.
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 vault, only to be opened after some special conditions regarding the support and lifespan of the software were met. Even if those terms were like, "only after the original copyright has expired", aka 70+ years, it would still be so much better for the state of preservation of source code over the current norms. We have games that have had their original source code lost in under a decade from their publication. (Kingdom Hearts 1) Any alternative is better than the current state of things.
> 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.
> 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.
I 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.
Sooner or later I'll split the game from data so the second part will be easier, allowing custom flatpaks to extend data. The flatpak has received updates especially for keeping an up-to-date runtime but the upstream game, however, has not and Flathub will only show appstream data for the update. You can see on the flatpak manifest repo that latest commit is 6 months old: https://github.com/flathub/com.github.k4zmu2a.spacecadetpinb...
I wish somebody had as a passion project or company to build Space Cadet into a real physical pinball table.
There have been a few attempts at this. I think the most well-known one is probably this one [1].
While we’re at it, I’d love to see a physical version of the seseame street pinbal table [2], though that one might be a bit more ambitious. :)
[1] - https://spacecadetpinball.wordpress.com
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZshZp-cxKg
Many people have thought about this, IIRC it's not physically possible to build because there is a lane that goes under a bumper (which in real life they extend down quite a bit) https://files.catbox.moe/pnaeri.png
Pop bumpers on an elevated/overlay playfield seems like a nightmare in general, maintenance would be a big pain. I can't think of a machine that has a pop like that, but my internal pinball database is getting pretty dusty.
You might be able to make the kickback lane work with a subway or maybe make the machine a widebody and go around the mess?
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 the table.
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.
Just put one pop bumper there, you could make it work
Hm what's the problem with that? I understand that the bumper extends down, but what else needs to be on the underside that makes this unbuildable?
I think it's because the bumpers on top (the white things with the blue dot in the middle) need a lot of space underneath and the line runs through the space that they would need.
Hm I understand the bumper part, but what does the line represent? Why does it need to run on the underside?
The line represents a physical tunnel through which the ball can travel.
Oh, there's a hole at the top of the line that leads to an underground lane? That makes sense, I couldn't make that out in the photo, thanks.
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.
I suggested this to a Stern employee 21 years ago, which obviously went nowhere. Back then they were trying to do a Halo machine, which also went nowhere.
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:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLukzzvvULU
Web based version for those feeling nostalgic
https://lrusso.github.io/3DPinballSpaceCadet/
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?
Google play games comes with a offline copy of snake, solitaire, minesweeper, and a few others. I'm not sure if that's bundled with phones or not, and the games are kinda hidden. I only found out about them because they come up if you try to search Google play without a connection.
I remember kids begging their parents to play Brick Breaker on their parents blackberries. Of course this was before young children having iPads was normalized
Please describe the precise ROI with $1M in research and studies, that will show an OS vendor will make a profit on such bundles.
(I can't imagine any other reason why, except maybe bug reports)
That reminds me, do skilled players actually use the tilt keys? I remember being confused for years as to the purpose of tilt keys because I hadn't used a real pinball machine, and I can't remember it nudging the ball enough to merit the risk.
Yes tilting an actual pinball machine is very legitimate. On the other end, pinball machines have adjustable legs and the arcade owner will make adjustments to the machine to throw people off. Not daily, but when they notice someone is constantly earning free plays, they will take action. Any minor changes will cause the ball to take slightly different paths.
It's been forever since I played space cadet, but skillful nudging is beneficial in many video pinballs. A little nudge here and there helps save balls from the drain and can help make some shots.
All good pinball players tilt. Owners can make the machine "loose" or "tight" (at least that what we used to call it.) A loose machine allows a lot of tilting, and a tight one only allows slight nudges.
If the ball is coming straight down the middle, there's no choice but to tilt. A really good player will be able to tilt the tightest machine enough to get that ball to a flipper. Also, a really good player is better at judging "straight down the middle" and choosing not to tilt at all. Anybody who is reasonable at pinball can play for an infinite amount of time on a very loose machine.
It's not actually a factor that can be removed from pinball. You can't have machines tilting when people just lean against them, or when a player pushes a flipper button energetically. The owner has to pick some threshold. They're irredeemably physical games.
It is also available as a snap:
https://snapcraft.io/space-cadet-pinball
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 like a much more flat and less 3D windows experience.
You can see some Hyper-3D Pinball / Tilt! gameplay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9ufwSkB0XQ
* Not to be confused with "Full Tilt!", from which space cadet pinball comes from.
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.
I loved playing Epic Pinball and especially the music. Exactly the kind of sound I enjoy. I collected mod files on floppies as a kid.
Other pinball games are bland and boring to me.
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!
Yeah the Pro Pinball series cstarted arriving around the same time as Windows 95. I guess people liked the Windows game because it was just a few clicks away.
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
Some of us only had pinball. My parents didn’t buy games, so I got what was included.
Define better.
It's really no surprise: it's a game that was pre-installed on hundreds of millions of computers. That's it. For people of a certain age it's very very likely they have played it, at least a bit.
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...
Things included with Plus! packs were often rolled into subsequent versions of Windows, and Pinball is such an example.
It was, but in NT 4.0, 2000, Me and XP.
It was bundled with XP.
Is it legal?
Who cares?
The guy you're responding to obviously cares. Being dismissive of his desire to do the right thing is kind of rude.