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

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.

I have struggled to get this project working on non-Windows. It just hangs and crashes no matter what I do or try on Linux/Mac. It's a very Windows-oriented project that's slowly losing the shackles right now.

And the version from Full Tilt is a significantly enhanced version of the game. It has multiball, where the Windows bundled version doesn't.

> Any alternative is better than the current state of things.

I don't know, the incentives for creators are already low enough. Any book one writes lands immediately in Anna's Archive and is digested into LLM slop for the profit of Altman & Co. Any piece of investigative journalism, when shared here or on Reddit, sees a link to some paywall-bypass site as one of the most upvoted comments. So we are already in a Bastiat's window situation where people are disincentivized to produce creative work. I'd rather not put the work of software creators even more at risk of being cheaply copied and copyright laundered: any state vault would be an easy target for trillion-dollar corporations.

Aside, as someone doing retro reverse engineering I greatly appreciate the author's words about the tension between software preservation and the need to reward creators for their work.

It's not quite FLOSS escrow, but source code escrow is somewhat common among big enterprise software contracts. There are companies that facilitate this, e.g. https://www.escrowcompany.co/source-code-escrow/

I honestly do not think source code will be all that useful. Make it so redistribution, decompilation, reverse-engineering and reimplementation is legal after sales stop and that covers it.

> I think it's Windows only though (very, tables are all scripted in VBScript and PinMAME is loaded as a COM object).

Fortunately for us, you're wrong :-)

VPX now runs on Linux, Mac, iOS, and Android. And it runs great on those platforms thanks to some pioneering work by the dev jsm174. The VBScript bits are handled using just enough Wine to make it happen but the rest of it is all native. Surround sound feedback (SSF), the Direct Output Framework (DOF), Pinup Popper packs (PUP Packs) etc are all supported as well. The GUI that used to be Windows only is now built into Windows / Mac / Linux versions via ImGUI and can be brought up live during play.

If you want to try it out, log into Github and download the latest action for your platform [0]. Most non-Windows users will want to use the latest version in master as this brings the most amount of parity to the Windows version compared to the 10.8.0 release last year. Use the BGFX version as that has the new multithreaded rendering backend that supports Metal and Vulkan. If you want to learn more, best to check out the Virtual Pinball Chat Discord [1] or poke around the wiki [2].

The devs have been putting in a lot of work to generally make VPX cross platform and it shows. I have built my own Pincab [3] based on it and its amazing.

*Edit*: Should have mentioned that VPX is now supported by Batocera as well, though the VPX version in there is getting a bit long in the tooth.

[0] https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball/actions/workflows/vpinb...

[1] https://discord.gg/BhR9h5aWm

[2] https://github.com/dekay/vpinball-wiki/wiki/About-Visual-Pin...

[3] https://github.com/dekay/vpin-cabinet/

I intuitively feel like more realistic games could be more fun, and that I might just have fondness for Space Cadet from growing up with it; but the more I played other pinball games the more I appreciate that space cadet is a simply great game to play, it feels great and there's a great variety of things to keep you hooked.

I wish I could find another pinball game I enjoyed as much. The closest experiences I could find are Xenotitle and Demon's Tilt but I found them harder to get into and get good at.

The next best thing imo is Yoku's Island Express.

I've played a lot of pinball. Space Cadet is a very good pinball game in terms of design, balance, and interest. I wouldn't short it.

There have been a few attempts at this. I think the most well-known one is probably this one [1].

While we’re at it, I’d love to see a physical version of the seseame street pinbal table [2], though that one might be a bit more ambitious. :)

[1] - https://spacecadetpinball.wordpress.com

[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZshZp-cxKg

Many people have thought about this, IIRC it's not physically possible to build because there is a lane that goes under a bumper (which in real life they extend down quite a bit) https://files.catbox.moe/pnaeri.png

I suggested this to a Stern employee 21 years ago, which obviously went nowhere. Back then they were trying to do a Halo machine, which also went nowhere.

That would be doing something nice for the user at the expense of doing slightly less funneling traffic to their app store where they make their money on adtech and access fees.

We wouldn't want to leave any money on the table in the pursuit of a better product, would we?

Google play games comes with a offline copy of snake, solitaire, minesweeper, and a few others. I'm not sure if that's bundled with phones or not, and the games are kinda hidden. I only found out about them because they come up if you try to search Google play without a connection.

I remember kids begging their parents to play Brick Breaker on their parents blackberries. Of course this was before young children having iPads was normalized

Please describe the precise ROI with $1M in research and studies, that will show an OS vendor will make a profit on such bundles.

(I can't imagine any other reason why, except maybe bug reports)

Yes tilting an actual pinball machine is very legitimate. On the other end, pinball machines have adjustable legs and the arcade owner will make adjustments to the machine to throw people off. Not daily, but when they notice someone is constantly earning free plays, they will take action. Any minor changes will cause the ball to take slightly different paths.

It's been forever since I played space cadet, but skillful nudging is beneficial in many video pinballs. A little nudge here and there helps save balls from the drain and can help make some shots.

All good pinball players tilt. Owners can make the machine "loose" or "tight" (at least that what we used to call it.) A loose machine allows a lot of tilting, and a tight one only allows slight nudges.

If the ball is coming straight down the middle, there's no choice but to tilt. A really good player will be able to tilt the tightest machine enough to get that ball to a flipper. Also, a really good player is better at judging "straight down the middle" and choosing not to tilt at all. Anybody who is reasonable at pinball can play for an infinite amount of time on a very loose machine.

It's not actually a factor that can be removed from pinball. You can't have machines tilting when people just lean against them, or when a player pushes a flipper button energetically. The owner has to pick some threshold. They're irredeemably physical games.

Pinball Dreams first on a friend's Amiga and then my PC for me, later Pro Pinball. Space Cadet was hopeless garbage in comparison. Space Cadet had a boring table, much worse graphics and sound, and terrible ball physics.

I still applaud the Linux version for its hack value :)

I loved playing Epic Pinball and especially the music. Exactly the kind of sound I enjoy. I collected mod files on floppies as a kid.

Other pinball games are bland and boring to me.

Honestly my favorite pinball game of all time is not at all realistic: Devil Crush (I think it was called Devil Crash in the USA). It has been released on both the pcengine and the megadrive. For some reason I tend to prefer the pcengine more despite the graphics quality being a bit below, probably because of the more "dirty" sounding soundtrack. This is my main occupation when I am flying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-7iC8z6q8s&t=7

Yeah the Pro Pinball series cstarted arriving around the same time as Windows 95. I guess people liked the Windows game because it was just a few clicks away.

I was a fan of "3D Ultra Pinball". You have to keep smacking that glider!

Some of us only had pinball. My parents didn’t buy games, so I got what was included.

Define better.

It's really no surprise: it's a game that was pre-installed on hundreds of millions of computers. That's it. For people of a certain age it's very very likely they have played it, at least a bit.

It was actually part of Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95. It wasn't directly available for Windows 98 at all, but the Windows 98 install disc does include an INF file so you can install it, provided you have a copy of Plus! for Windows 95.

It was also included with Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows Me, and Windows XP (both the original and x64 versions). Finally removed in Vista to never return.

Things included with Plus! packs were often rolled into subsequent versions of Windows, and Pinball is such an example.

It was, but in NT 4.0, 2000, Me and XP.

It was bundled with XP.

Who cares?