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Comment by GoblinSlayer | Hacker News Reader

I unpacked pinball from 64-bit windows xp cd, played it and the only bug I see is that the launcher isn't well visible.

It is incredible that even in 2021 people still parrot Chen's original _WRONG_ post about Pinball not being available in x64 Windows. We already even mentioned that in the original entry of his blog before the comments were removed.

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.

I just looked in wikipedia, where it says xp had a working amd64 version.

Someone edited that in a couple weeks ago. (And cites a "Youtube video" as source. Sigh. )

I pirated (sorry) the Windows version of Space Cadet Pinball from some big torrent tracker (TBP, Demonoid?)some time after that blog post was put up and it worked on Windows 7. Last time I saw this story making the rounds, around 2017, I checked to see if it still worked on Windows 10 and to my surprise, it did. I don't know what sort of unofficial patch was applied if any, but it has been working on 64 bit windows for nearly a decade from what I can tell.

So there are various Youtubes about this... but it was 'Windows XP 64bit-Edition' (yes 'Edition' is part of the name. This specifically refers to IA-64 and not AMD64. There are rendering issues on the AMD64 versions but the IA-64 version doesn't work. Windows XP 64bit (non-edition) that was on AMD64 actually did ship with 3d pinball, albeit with some rendering issues. Best guess is that it was later removed in vista because it didn't fit the shiny new games theme that existed then. Raymond was giving his view of his part of the port to IA-64.

So, Microsoft had an agreement with Intel that Itanium version will be no worse than amd64 version, so they couldn't release pinball only for amd64 version?

They did release it for the windows XP 64bit editions for AMD64. So no it was definitely released, it has rendering issues but it is there and works AFAIK. As best I can tell it was removed because it didn't fit vista's aesthetic not that they couldn't get it to work.

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.

Windows for AMD64 is called x64 Edition, it also includes "Edition" on the name. Windows for IA64 is called 64-bit Edition.

Because Microsoft couldn't make it more confusing... lol

They could not really help it. It was not that clear these days what would exactly succeed x86 as the mainstream 64-bit architecture.

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