I had heard about this bug, I think I saw it on Dave Plummer's YouTube channel[1]. I remember thinking at the time that I am surprised nobody has tried to decompile it and figure it out, looks like k4zmu2a did and couldn't find it. Now I have more questions about the original bug reports.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNzszbnvQeFzObW0ghk0Ckw
[1] Why was Pinball removed from Windows Vista? https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121218-00/?p=58...
> [...] we simply couldn’t figure out why the collision detector was not working. Heck, we couldn’t even find the collision detector!
"We had several million lines of code still to port, so we couldn’t afford to spend days studying the code trying to figure out what obscure floating point rounding error was causing collision detection to fail."
I'd say Ray is right, not lacking the skill, but lacking the time
It's nice to be able to point to this line: https://github.com/k4zmu2a/SpaceCadetPinball/blob/5947727f80...
And, while it is true that the code is sparsely commented, the geometry code that computes ray intersections is commented.
I'm curious, didn't they just call you or Danny (I believe that's Danny Thorpe, who is currently working for Microsoft) for assistance?
Tens of "YouTube videos" appear in this thread and all of them simply parrot the same statement from Chen and not a single one of them even bothers to actually try Windows XP x64 edition and check whether Pinball is there not. Again only in some comments people seem to realize 'hey, you guys may be wrong .. there is a x64 pinball here after all, at least'.
I guess it's a sad reflection of our society.
Because if MS had that agreement... almost nothing would have been released on AMD64 as very little actually made it to IA-64 or was supported there realistically.