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Comment by s20n | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

There were some other easter eggs also that Microsoft ended up disabling. One showed the credits for the folks who worked on the game. If I remember right, it was triggered when you typed "Cinematronics", or maybe "Cinematronics!"... It's been a while since I put that in. And I think there was one that turned the balls into smiley faces, but maybe that was only on the Full Tilt tables.

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.

I didn't even think about the fact that its STILL on GitHub and they never did a takedown request even before it was on GitHub. It's such old Windows related code, part of it does not surprise me.

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.

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.

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

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

I really doubt that any AI model was ever exposed to the original Space Cadet Pinball game.

I don't think that counts.

It's crazy that license laundering is still the primary use case for LLMs.

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