Why was Pinball removed from Windows Vista? (2012)

One of really cool (personal favorite) games from that era was Hover by Eric Undersander. While not removed, it only runs on Windows with limited resolution options, etc.

I was lucky enough to contact its creator and he agreed to open source it, so I can one day finish a modern cross-platform port that I can enjoy on OS X at 4k resolutions, etc.

https://github.com/shurcooL/Hover#hover

Unlike books, games tend to suffer this fate where you can't easily enjoy the classics from many years ago because they run on proprietary/closed source systems and aren't maintained.

The best part of that post is the comments from (AFACT all of) the original Cinematronics developers. It's a refreshing reminder of the days when programmers couldn't rely on raw hardware speed to make something like this run as smoothly as it did. They routinely had to invent their own clever (or sometimes not-so-clever) performance hacks, and what's really impressive is how well they remembered those hacks even a decade later.

It's a wonderful thing that we now have faster hardware, and better knowledge of how to solve these kinds of problems cleanly, and more available libraries/frameworks to encapsulate that knowledge. Still, hats of to the pioneers who were traveling that territory before the superhighways were built.

Pinball did an excellent job of showcasing the graphics possibilities of Windows at a time when people expected to fire up MS-DOS for a PC game beyond Solitaire. Although it was instantly playable (and enjoyably so) it did not suffer from being overwhelmingly addictive - work was possible. In some ways the limited life of the game is fine, it did its job and showed that games on Windows could have little touches like hi-res colour graphics.

Currently I have a Windows 8 PC that is there for reading emails. I do all my real work on another box. I have tried to use the Office apps and such like so it is not like I have not tried to use this Windows PC. However, I have no idea what games it comes with. On older Windows such feature would be discovered in seconds even if you had never used a computer before. With the newer Windows 8 there is no such discovery - in fact I only learned how to do power off 'mouse only' without using CTRL+ALT+DEL last week.

Looking back I wish Windows did have pleasant surprises such as the Pinball game rather than be what it has become. Windows isn't really a 'serious' piece of software any more.

Pinball in Windows was just the first table of Maxis Full Tilt Pinball (which was published but not written by Maxis iirc), and was very fun, however, I don't think it was the best Pinball table made. That award I would give to Epic Pinball's Super Android table, which is shareware from the 386 era and runs fine in DosBox.

The pinball game, by the way, is a stripped version of Maxis Full Tilt! Pinball. I had a copy of the game bundled with some other Maxis game.

That said, I had several other pinball games at the time and I thought that Full Tilt! was one of the worst ones, so I don't understand the love that surrounds it.

You can download it here:

http://www.techspot.com/downloads/5697-microsoft-pinball-for...

Works for me on Windows 7.

There are some great comments from the last time this was submitted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4938348

Code needs constant loving eyes on it or rigor mortis sets in and it's almost impossible to revive.

As I recall when they went from Vista to 7 they removed Inkball and some others as well.

I thought it was some licensing problem because most if not all of the games were licensed from third party companies.

Anyone remember the old Microsoft Windows Entertainment Pack with Tetris and other games? They were all 16 bit and when Windows went to 64 bits they wouldn't work anymore and they didn't convert them to 32 bit, and I think they didn't have the license to Tetris anymore to make a 32 bit version because of some lawsuit that Atari, Nintendo, and others had made illegal copies of it over the licensing rights between the Russian programmer and the company he worked for at the time he wrote Tetris.

If my memory doesn't trick me, there was a text you could type on word with a certain keyboard shortcut or something like that (sort of konami code) which let you play pinball under the Word program. Any one remember that one ?

Anyone here by chance who has contacts at Sierra Entertainment? I'm reverse engineering good old EarthSiege 2 and could use some help from its creators :)

Always comment your code. The online post kindly submitted here documents one reason why commenting code is important. (And why structuring the code reasonably around modules that reflect the code's functionality is a good idea.) Yeah, code is only rarely written that way, but the code that is better documented lives longer.

Maybe add 2012 to the title?

If you want to play a great, classic pinball game, install an Apple II emulator and look for a disk image of Night Mission Pinball.

Most of the comments on that article are really depressing, ill considered mumblings from armchair programmers.

All they needed to write is a collision detector detector!

I volunteer to invest the time to port it :).

Can anyone confirm if Pinball shipped with XP/Server 2003 x64, and whether it was a 32-bit or 64-bit executable there? (if you have the CD, you should be able to look for PINBALL.EX_ on it and expand it to see if it is 32-bit or 64-bit)

And presumably, they couldn't just ship the (still working) 32-bit executable because... politics.

So Microsoft openly admits they shipped code with their operating system that they did not review or even understand what it contained.

Well that's just sad. Pinball was dropped because of incompetent programmers. Don't 32-bit binaries work on 64-bit anyways?

Windows 8 came across as a kind of entertainment toy device that focused on content consumption and advertisement delivery embedded right in the start menus.

Removing the silly game could be part of Microsoft's agenda to undo the damage that Windows 8 did to its image, and rebrand itself as a "Windows OS is for getting work done" tool, rather than a novelty 'yon dungeon' video game where you try to swipe, swirl, shake, and charm your way through the 7 steps everyone must do to get to the control panel.