How Space Cadet pinball won the Windows desktop | Hacker News Reader

How Space Cadet pinball won the Windows desktop

kernelmag.dailydot.com

67 pointsdavidst16 comments

In 2005 I started to dabble with reverse engineering, and the first target I ever attempted was 3D Pinball... and amazingly enough I found a never-before-found cheat code (and some other bits from Cinematronics).

I wrote up an article that went a bit viral at the time: http://www.mrspeaker.net/2006/01/07/hacking-pinball/. 3d-pinball-related keywords are still among the highest search terms in my logs ;)

You discovered that? Neat! I came here to post this link, which includes info about the debug mode and other hidden features. https://tcrf.net/3D_Pinball:_Space_Cadet

Anyone know the story behind Hover!

Including something like that on the Windows 95 CD was an odd decision. Sure, on one hand it shows Windows 95 can do 3D graphics/games, but it was such a terrible game and the performance was so terrible, it just added fuel to 'Windows sucks for games' fire.

I am very thankful for Hover and Pinball. They made me want a faster and less buggy computer. This resulted in wonderful mishaps -- deleting Win system files, recovering into Vector Linux, trying Win 3.11 for WG, and finally ending up in Win98 SE. All the in between is free knowledge. All due to Hover running at 3FPS on my Cirrus Logic onboard gpu/100mhz cpu.

In my heart, the reason for Hover -- to plant a seed forging low level algorithm programmers.

There was an updated version of Space Cadet on the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marble_Drop I got as a kid. (I somehow played that before I found the standard windows version, so I might be a bit biased. ;) ) The Marble Drop version is way more polished windows version, everything 'just works' a little better. Shots line up better, graphics are better... it feels like a really solid patch. Plus, two new tables, "pirates" and "dragons"!

Ah, here it is! https://tcrf.net/Full_Tilt!_Pinball

Available at Majorgeeks: http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/microsoft_windows_pi...

Anyone want to comment on how safe this download site is?

Majorgeeks is excellent. However, their refusal to accept money to distribute crapware means they are extremely dependent on donations. ISTR they were having to lay off staff...

Majorgeeks is fine to download from

Does anyone remember Night Mission pinball for the C64 and early PC? Is Space Cadet related to Night Mission at all?

http://thehouseofgames.org/index.php?t=10&id=358

And a video of game play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ttoAfg7Ehc

Ah pinball.

I got banned from all school computers for "hacking" after I started using the MS Word 97 pinball easter egg to play pinball in typing class when they removed the "official" pinball game:

http://www.eeggs.com/items/763.html

I always enjoyed how it would instantly peg the CPU to 100% on every system I ever ran it on.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2005/12/01/49888...

Alongside Windows 95 Plus!, it was also in Windows NT 4, which incorporated most of the 95 Plus! stuff.

Which is kinda ironic given it's a business OS. Office workers get Pinball free, home users have to pay extra!

NT 4 was fantastic. It may not have run games particularly well, but it was so much more stable than Windows 95, and gave me my first introduction to networking.

"[David Cole, head of the Windows 95 production team] grumbled… ‘Can’t we just get a game of pinball or something like that?’"

I can't decide whether to deride the lameness or celebrate the pragmatism of this statement. It does capture Mr. Cole perfectly, though -- and perhaps hints why everything he touched after Win95 turned sour.

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