7 ms·

I am one of the original authors of Space Cadet pinball (along with Mike Sandige, lead programmer, and Kevin Gliner, producer and designer.) It is surprising an

I am one of the original authors of Space Cadet pinball (along with Mike Sandige, lead programmer, and Kevin Gliner, producer and designer.) It is surprising and gratifying to see interest is still alive for our old game. And I can't help but be impressed by the ingenuity shown by both the decompiling effort and the playable web-based game.

papito 5y ago
We played the hell out of it on our Windows 2000 machines during particularly boring IT labs in college, in early 2000s. The physics just seemed so spot on. I installed Win2K on a VM recently, just for this. Start Menu, type in "pinball". Ah....
- _fat_santa 5y ago
  Was it available on Windows 2000? I know it was a default on Windows XP. I was way too young back then to remember
  - papito 5y ago
    Definitely. It was available (apparently) even with a Win95 upgrade pack, so it's very old. I was not aware of it, however. I am not sure it was as easy to launch before, by just typing in "pinball" in the Start menu.
SubiculumCode 5y ago
Well, it is simply one of the best pinball games I've ever played on a computer. Interesting scoring system. Fair. Not gimmicky. Pure beauty.
californical 5y ago
Wow, this game was a staple in my childhood! Just wanted to let you know that your work brought me lots of happiness as a kid, so thank you :) Out of curiosity, have you ever written about the experience? Technical challenges, the development culture, etc?
- davidst 5y ago
  Thanks! There were a couple of interviews with gaming magazines years ago. They would be hard to find today and didn't cover the topics you mentioned. Mike, Kevin, and I, really need to get together to tell the story some day.
  - coldacid 5y ago
    Please do! There are loads of us who would love to hear it all direct from you guys.
    - JanNash 5y ago
      Yes, that would be amazing! I absolutely adored playing this game on our first family PC back in the day.
- kgliner 5y ago
  I've been meaning to write up a history, but it's one of those things that's been on my to do list for years...Maybe someday, soon. Kevin
ur-whale 5y ago
I can't help but wonder for old closed-source utilities and games like this: whatever happened to the original source code? Is it still around, stashed in a vault a MSFT, or is it lost for ever? Do you know? And what would it take to convince a large corp. like MSFT to actually release the original under some open source license ... not like the thing has much value by now other than historical.
- davidst 5y ago
  The rights belong to Electronic Arts today. They acquired Maxis who had acquired us (Cinematronics.) Microsoft may still have rights to continue publishing a version with the Windows operating system. Microsoft, if you're reading this, we would be glad to provide assistance in getting 3D Pinball running again on the latest Windows OS.
  - leeter 5y ago
    Given that the reason it was removed was IA-64 which isn't a thing anymore... this should be plausible. But also given where MS has gone with games as late I'd be surprised if they do. EA should just release all of Full Tilt! Pinball on steam or GoG if they haven't already.
    - JonathonW 5y ago
      It was removed for Vista, because it couldn't transition to AMD64. This was after Microsoft had essentially completely ditched Itanium. (I'd love to see a GOG or Steam or even Origin release of Full Tilt Pinball, though. The Full Tilt version of Space Cadet is better-- higher-resolution graphics plus some gameplay tweaks.) [edit] Digging a little deeper, that might not be entirely true. The first consumer version of Windows it didn't appear in was Vista, but it sounds like the decision to drop Pinball was made during the XP era (even though it shipped with x86 Windows XP). So issues with the IA64 port (or with another architecture) might've been the reason it was dropped, then that decision was not revisited for Vista even if Pinball might've worked under AMD64 Windows.
nspattak 5y ago
it was the most joyful game that shipped with windows and it was also fun! I would like to play it again :)
deknos 5y ago
if the game would be available as open source and/or run on linux, that would be super... this was my first pc game when i was a little child
- scruffyherder 5y ago
  Check the SDL port or the emscripten
- GTP 5y ago
  You can easily compile it on Linux following the instructions in the repo and grab the game assets from here: https://www.reddit.com/r/vitahacks/comments/pro8x1/comment/hdk9f1o/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/vitahacks/comments/pro8x1/comment/h... Tested on Arch Linux, works flawlessy!
- anthk 5y ago
  It runs perfectly on Void as my example.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I played it before it was bundled with Windows, at the time I didn't think that much of it (I was more into Epic Pinball, spent so much time on the shareware version with the android themed board <_<), but it was a game we'd fire up Windows for. We probably got it off one of those shareware CD's, but I don't recall. Might have been off a diskette?
mike_san 5y ago
I'm impressed as well! It's exciting to see folks so enthusiastic about the game. I took a deeper look at the github project. It's been a long time since I worked on the Space Cadet code, but the decompiled github code is pretty familiar. It's formatted differently of course, but I think it's actually better than the original. And, nice! Check it out David and Kevin: k4zmu2a got the quotes in! https://github.com/k4zmu2a/SpaceCadetPinball/blob/master/SpaceCadetPinball/control.cpp#L647 https://github.com/k4zmu2a/SpaceCadetPinball/blob/master/Spa... Now I'll never live down how long I spent working on the flippers. Bonus points for anyone who knows why the classes in the source are prefixed with a 'T'! -Mike Sandige (Lead programmer on Space Cadet)
- mzs 5y ago
  "She may already be a glue bottle" What?
  - mike_san 5y ago
    This quote is mine, and is related to a game we were working on for Microsoft before we pivoted to pinball. There was a bug - probably mine - where the game displayed the previous state for an object, but the object had changed state, so the resulting behavior was confusing. 'she' and 'glue bottle' were referring to imagery used for the placeholder prototype artwork. I was trying to explain what was going on, and it made sense, but only in that incredibly constrained context. Outside of that context it's nonsense, but that's what makes it memorable and humorous to us.
    - justsid 5y ago
      Definitely thought that was about a childhood horse
- mysterydip 5y ago
  Thanks to both of you. It took me a while to realize the depth built in. I tried making a pinball game many moons ago but couldn't get the ball to "feel" right (flippers as well). How was that process? Did you go play physical tables, go for a realistic approach, or tweak magic numbers until it "felt right"?
baq 5y ago
'twas a great little game. good job!
BiteCode_dev 5y ago
Well, in this day and age of bazooka DMCA take down, it's refreshing to see a game author happy about his game being gutted, and put online to play.
- q-big 5y ago
  > it's refreshing to see a game author happy about his game being gutted, and put online to play. The game author is typically not the copyright holder.
bloqs 5y ago
Great to see you here David. Thanks for all the work over the years.
_fat_santa 5y ago
Thank you sir, you brought many many hours of enjoyment to my childhood. I remember being excited to go to my Aunt's house because she had a computer with Windows XP (my family only had Windows 2000) and I could play your game. And only on hacker news will I be replying to one of the authors.
freedomben 5y ago
This game blew my mind! How did you get the physics to be so realistic? At the time I tried a number of different pinball implementations and unrealistic physics was a big problem.
- mike_san 5y ago
  Thanks! We modeled collision boundaries with high resolution, and tried to use physically appropriate material settings. But this had to run on relatively slow machines, so the physics model itself was pretty basic. Except for the flippers. I really wanted them to feel like physical flippers - predictable, controllable, and without computational problems that let the ball pass through them sometimes. :( I put lots of time into the flippers, and had some trouble balancing those requirements with the available CPU - it wouldn't do to have the game slow down to figure out how the ball should move when you hit the flippers.
- kgliner 5y ago
  I noted this in another reply, but Mike had written a scripting model that let me adjust the physics and materials for each component separately. That allowed me to iterate rapidly when tuning the feel of the game. A solid physics engine is a pre-requisite, but what you do with it from there is also critical (and the goal was to replicate how real world tables felt, not how they actually behaved).
marivilla 5y ago
I played this game for hours a day, for an entire summer. And it was the best summer of my life. I remember getting up early, making cereal, and then playing this. You created one of my favorite childhood memories, thank you so much.

papito 5y ago

We played the hell out of it on our Windows 2000 machines during particularly boring IT labs in college, in early 2000s. The physics just seemed so spot on. I installed Win2K on a VM recently, just for this. Start Menu, type in "pinball". Ah....

_fat_santa 5y ago
Was it available on Windows 2000? I know it was a default on Windows XP. I was way too young back then to remember
- papito 5y ago
  Definitely. It was available (apparently) even with a Win95 upgrade pack, so it's very old. I was not aware of it, however. I am not sure it was as easy to launch before, by just typing in "pinball" in the Start menu.

SubiculumCode 5y ago

Well, it is simply one of the best pinball games I've ever played on a computer. Interesting scoring system. Fair. Not gimmicky. Pure beauty.

californical 5y ago

Wow, this game was a staple in my childhood! Just wanted to let you know that your work brought me lots of happiness as a kid, so thank you :) Out of curiosity, have you ever written about the experience? Technical challenges, the development culture, etc?

davidst 5y ago
Thanks! There were a couple of interviews with gaming magazines years ago. They would be hard to find today and didn't cover the topics you mentioned. Mike, Kevin, and I, really need to get together to tell the story some day.
- coldacid 5y ago
  Please do! There are loads of us who would love to hear it all direct from you guys.
  - JanNash 5y ago
    Yes, that would be amazing! I absolutely adored playing this game on our first family PC back in the day.
kgliner 5y ago
I've been meaning to write up a history, but it's one of those things that's been on my to do list for years...Maybe someday, soon. Kevin

ur-whale 5y ago

I can't help but wonder for old closed-source utilities and games like this: whatever happened to the original source code? Is it still around, stashed in a vault a MSFT, or is it lost for ever? Do you know? And what would it take to convince a large corp. like MSFT to actually release the original under some open source license ... not like the thing has much value by now other than historical.

davidst 5y ago
The rights belong to Electronic Arts today. They acquired Maxis who had acquired us (Cinematronics.) Microsoft may still have rights to continue publishing a version with the Windows operating system. Microsoft, if you're reading this, we would be glad to provide assistance in getting 3D Pinball running again on the latest Windows OS.
- leeter 5y ago
  Given that the reason it was removed was IA-64 which isn't a thing anymore... this should be plausible. But also given where MS has gone with games as late I'd be surprised if they do. EA should just release all of Full Tilt! Pinball on steam or GoG if they haven't already.
  - JonathonW 5y ago
    It was removed for Vista, because it couldn't transition to AMD64. This was after Microsoft had essentially completely ditched Itanium. (I'd love to see a GOG or Steam or even Origin release of Full Tilt Pinball, though. The Full Tilt version of Space Cadet is better-- higher-resolution graphics plus some gameplay tweaks.) [edit] Digging a little deeper, that might not be entirely true. The first consumer version of Windows it didn't appear in was Vista, but it sounds like the decision to drop Pinball was made during the XP era (even though it shipped with x86 Windows XP). So issues with the IA64 port (or with another architecture) might've been the reason it was dropped, then that decision was not revisited for Vista even if Pinball might've worked under AMD64 Windows.

nspattak 5y ago

it was the most joyful game that shipped with windows and it was also fun! I would like to play it again :)

deknos 5y ago

if the game would be available as open source and/or run on linux, that would be super... this was my first pc game when i was a little child

scruffyherder 5y ago
Check the SDL port or the emscripten
GTP 5y ago
You can easily compile it on Linux following the instructions in the repo and grab the game assets from here: https://www.reddit.com/r/vitahacks/comments/pro8x1/comment/hdk9f1o/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/vitahacks/comments/pro8x1/comment/h... Tested on Arch Linux, works flawlessy!
anthk 5y ago
It runs perfectly on Void as my example.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

I played it before it was bundled with Windows, at the time I didn't think that much of it (I was more into Epic Pinball, spent so much time on the shareware version with the android themed board <_<), but it was a game we'd fire up Windows for. We probably got it off one of those shareware CD's, but I don't recall. Might have been off a diskette?

mike_san 5y ago

I'm impressed as well! It's exciting to see folks so enthusiastic about the game. I took a deeper look at the github project. It's been a long time since I worked on the Space Cadet code, but the decompiled github code is pretty familiar. It's formatted differently of course, but I think it's actually better than the original. And, nice! Check it out David and Kevin: k4zmu2a got the quotes in! https://github.com/k4zmu2a/SpaceCadetPinball/blob/master/SpaceCadetPinball/control.cpp#L647 https://github.com/k4zmu2a/SpaceCadetPinball/blob/master/Spa... Now I'll never live down how long I spent working on the flippers. Bonus points for anyone who knows why the classes in the source are prefixed with a 'T'! -Mike Sandige (Lead programmer on Space Cadet)

mzs 5y ago
"She may already be a glue bottle" What?
- mike_san 5y ago
  This quote is mine, and is related to a game we were working on for Microsoft before we pivoted to pinball. There was a bug - probably mine - where the game displayed the previous state for an object, but the object had changed state, so the resulting behavior was confusing. 'she' and 'glue bottle' were referring to imagery used for the placeholder prototype artwork. I was trying to explain what was going on, and it made sense, but only in that incredibly constrained context. Outside of that context it's nonsense, but that's what makes it memorable and humorous to us.
  - justsid 5y ago
    Definitely thought that was about a childhood horse
mysterydip 5y ago
Thanks to both of you. It took me a while to realize the depth built in. I tried making a pinball game many moons ago but couldn't get the ball to "feel" right (flippers as well). How was that process? Did you go play physical tables, go for a realistic approach, or tweak magic numbers until it "felt right"?

baq 5y ago

'twas a great little game. good job!

BiteCode_dev 5y ago

Well, in this day and age of bazooka DMCA take down, it's refreshing to see a game author happy about his game being gutted, and put online to play.

q-big 5y ago
> it's refreshing to see a game author happy about his game being gutted, and put online to play. The game author is typically not the copyright holder.

bloqs 5y ago

Great to see you here David. Thanks for all the work over the years.

_fat_santa 5y ago

Thank you sir, you brought many many hours of enjoyment to my childhood. I remember being excited to go to my Aunt's house because she had a computer with Windows XP (my family only had Windows 2000) and I could play your game. And only on hacker news will I be replying to one of the authors.

freedomben 5y ago

This game blew my mind! How did you get the physics to be so realistic? At the time I tried a number of different pinball implementations and unrealistic physics was a big problem.

mike_san 5y ago
Thanks! We modeled collision boundaries with high resolution, and tried to use physically appropriate material settings. But this had to run on relatively slow machines, so the physics model itself was pretty basic. Except for the flippers. I really wanted them to feel like physical flippers - predictable, controllable, and without computational problems that let the ball pass through them sometimes. :( I put lots of time into the flippers, and had some trouble balancing those requirements with the available CPU - it wouldn't do to have the game slow down to figure out how the ball should move when you hit the flippers.
kgliner 5y ago
I noted this in another reply, but Mike had written a scripting model that let me adjust the physics and materials for each component separately. That allowed me to iterate rapidly when tuning the feel of the game. A solid physics engine is a pre-requisite, but what you do with it from there is also critical (and the goal was to replicate how real world tables felt, not how they actually behaved).

marivilla 5y ago

I played this game for hours a day, for an entire summer. And it was the best summer of my life. I remember getting up early, making cereal, and then playing this. You created one of my favorite childhood memories, thank you so much.