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>The missing proprietary bits were not their own code. There was nothing to read and no documentation. They could see the call, and that something important hap
by jasode 7y ago
>The missing proprietary bits were not their own code. There was nothing to read and no documentation. They could see the call, and that something important happened, but what it did and how it should work was guesswork.
To your point, the following link is another famous example of smart programmers not being able to easily understand someone else's source code. Raymond Chen at Microsoft couldn't easily figure out why Pinball didn't work in 64bit Windows and gave up:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121218-00/?p=5803 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121218-00/?p=58...
- goto11 7y agoI'm sure they could have figured it out if it was important enough. They just decided it was not worth it and scrapped the product instead. "we couldn’t afford to spend days studying the code trying..." So the estimated time to fix the bug was on the scale of days. It would certainly have taken longer to rewrite the game from scratch if that was the alternative.
- marcoperaza 7y agoI’ve never understood why they had to port it at all. The 32-bit version of Pinball would have kept working just fine. And apparently, the binary from Windows XP still runs on Windows 10.