6 ms·

Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

354 points by jandeboevrie 5mo ago

kowalski7cc 5mo ago
Sooner or later I'll split the game from data so the second part will be easier, allowing custom flatpaks to extend data. The flatpak has received updates especially for keeping an up-to-date runtime but the upstream game, however, has not and Flathub will only show appstream data for the update. You can see on the flatpak manifest repo that latest commit is 6 months old: https://github.com/flathub/com.github.k4zmu2a.spacecadetpinball https://github.com/flathub/com.github.k4zmu2a.spacecadetpinb...
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
andai 5mo ago
Cool! I checked out the GitHub: https://github.com/k4zmu2a/SpaceCadetPinball https://github.com/k4zmu2a/SpaceCadetPinball It's been ported to a whole bunch of consoles. There's also a browser version! https://pinball.alula.me/ https://pinball.alula.me/ Also, turns out Space Cadet Pinball is part of a bigger Maxis game I never heard of: Full Tilt! Pinball. Also turns out we almost got DOOM bundled with Window 95! (GLUEM) but it was rejected: "Can't we just get a game of pinball or something like that?" And here we are :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Tilt!_Pinball#Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Tilt!_Pinball#Development
- vikingerik 5mo ago
  And the version from Full Tilt is a significantly enhanced version of the game. It has multiball, where the Windows bundled version doesn't.
  - fsckboy 5mo ago
    i've gotten multiball in the Windows version of SpaceCadet, pretty sure I wasn't the victim of the Full Tilt version supply chain attack because while I knew about other tables I've never seen any of them.
- nosrepa 5mo ago
  The CEO refutes that they were working on doom elsewhere in this thread.
- ramenat2am 5mo ago
  I wonder if they didn't bundle Doom with Windows 95 because, by those days' standards, it was a pretty scary and violent game, and they didn't want to deal with any possible backlash?
nh2 5mo ago
I wish somebody had as a passion project or company to build Space Cadet into a real physical pinball table.
- unleaded 5mo ago
  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 https://files.catbox.moe/pnaeri.png
  - stavros 5mo ago
    Hm what's the problem with that? I understand that the bumper extends down, but what else needs to be on the underside that makes this unbuildable?
    - BadBadJellyBean 5mo ago
      I think it's because the bumpers on top (the white things with the blue dot in the middle) need a lot of space underneath and the line runs through the space that they would need.
      - stavros 5mo ago
        Hm I understand the bumper part, but what does the line represent? Why does it need to run on the underside?
        jjmarr 5mo ago
        The line represents a physical tunnel through which the ball can travel.
        stavros 5mo ago
        Oh, there's a hole at the top of the line that leads to an underground lane? That makes sense, I couldn't make that out in the photo, thanks.
eterm 5mo ago
I'm always surprised at the nostalgia for Space Cadet Pinball. Perhaps it was just chance that I grew up playing what seemed like a much better pinball game ( Hyper-3D Pinball, aka Tilt!* ), but I was always underwhelmed by Space Cadet Pinball on windows. In reality they're both pretty similar, I just happened to play a lot of one before the other, but the full screen DOS experience was much richer than what felt like a much more flat and less 3D windows experience. You can see some Hyper-3D Pinball / Tilt! gameplay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9ufwSkB0XQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9ufwSkB0XQ * Not to be confused with "Full Tilt!", from which space cadet pinball comes from.
- MetaWhirledPeas 5mo ago
  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.
- peddling-brink 5mo ago
  Some of us only had pinball. My parents didn’t buy games, so I got what was included.
- ahartmetz 5mo ago
  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 :)
  - ahartmetz 5mo ago
    After watching a video, it seems like I misremembered the ball physics, but the rest seems more or less correct. The sound effects sound really cheap, the music... exists, and in the lower center of the table, there is... uh, a star-shaped gradient thing? That is usually where the most elaborate graphics of the table are! Like a cool spaceship or the space cadet or evil aliens or whatever.
- 5mo ago
unleaded 5mo ago
The Full Tilt version also has multiball which is missing from the Windows version. Lock a ball by shooting into a wormhole where the two lights are the same color, lock 3 balls to start. If you enjoy playing Space Cadet I would really recommend giving Visual Pinball a try. There are so many more pinball games better than Space Cadet, with amazing tables people have made for them all available for free. I think it's Windows only though (very, tables are all scripted in VBScript and PinMAME is loaded as a COM object). As an aside I tried to hack around with this and found out the programming for Space Cadet is pretty awful (not to disparage them or anything, it works). The state of the lights directly reflects the game state. (This is the cause of the bug where if you drain or start a mission while the rank-up light show is playing, you can skip a rank.)
- jgtrosh 5mo ago
  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.
- MegaDeKay 5mo ago
  > 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/vpinball.yml https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball/actions/workflows/vpinb... [1] https://discord.gg/BhR9h5aWm https://discord.gg/BhR9h5aWm [2] https://github.com/dekay/vpinball-wiki/wiki/About-Visual-Pinball https://github.com/dekay/vpinball-wiki/wiki/About-Visual-Pin... [3] https://github.com/dekay/vpin-cabinet/ https://github.com/dekay/vpin-cabinet/
stavros 5mo ago
Space Cadet wasn't bundled with Windows, was it? It was included in Microsoft Plus! 98 but not Windows 98.
- GranPC 5mo ago
  It was bundled with XP.
- seba_dos1 5mo ago
  It was, but in NT 4.0, 2000, Me and XP.
- TazeTSchnitzel 5mo ago
  Things included with Plus! packs were often rolled into subsequent versions of Windows, and Pinball is such an example.
- chungy 5mo ago
  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.
  - sakjur 5mo ago
    Raymond Chen has two blog posts that first describes why Space Cadet was removed because of a 64-bit rounding mode bug and then a follow-up post a decade later clarifying that that might not be the full story. It's a fun bit of Windows history trivia. - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121218-00/?p=5803 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121218-00/?p=58... - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220106-00/?p=106122 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220106-00/?p=10...
adito 5mo ago
I was wondering why newer OS doesn't bundle games with their default installation anymore? Even on smartphone. I remember on old dumb phone (nokia I think), you can play snake and some racing game. It even has multiplayer via bluetooth.
- RobotToaster 5mo ago
  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.
- b112 5mo ago
  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)
- morkalork 5mo ago
  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
- willis936 5mo ago
  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?
- WorldMaker 5mo ago
  Space Cadet (Pinball) has the most direct answer: it was written largely in x86 assembler and didn't survive a 64-bit translation attempt. Raymond Chen says the ball would ghost off the table, fall down and end the game in seconds when trying to run in 64-bit math. Raymond even takes personal responsibility for the failure to keep Space Cadet alive and disappointment it didn't survive past Windows XP: https://web.archive.org/web/20160205141748/https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121218-00/?p=5803 https://web.archive.org/web/20160205141748/https://blogs.msd... The larger answer to the rest of the games seems to be related: Windows trying to shrink its non-cross platform code "liabilities" and things it needed to translate between processor architectures. The games were never a priority for the Windows team. Most were either intern projects and/or contracted from "second party vendors". In Windows 8, Microsoft decided to completely contract all of the games to a second party, the strange and sometimes controversial Arkadium [1]. The Arkadium Solitaire and Minesweeper were installed by default for a while, but as Arkadium started injecting more ads and also quickly increasing the install sizes of the games, Microsoft did the natural thing and removed them as default installs so people would stop complaining about their size and/or ads and instead just adding shortcuts to install them from the Store. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkadium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkadium
andreapaiola 5mo ago
Is it legal?
- hggh 5mo ago
  Who cares?
  - bigstrat2003 5mo ago
    The guy you're responding to obviously cares. Being dismissive of his desire to do the right thing is kind of rude.
    - hggh 5mo ago
      Right thing == ethical != legal
flossly 5mo ago
I like the authors remark on "source code FLOSS escrow" at the bottom of the article. It's prolly hard to achieve legally, but the idea that a software is close source until it's no longer sold then automatically becomes open source would attract me as a potential user/buyer of the software: less lock-in in the worst-case scenario (being fully dependent on it wile company goes bust or decides to cancel the project). Reminds me a bit of the https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/ https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/ <<The "social contract" ensuring Qt remains open-source is primarily maintained through the KDE Free Qt Foundation, established in 1998. This agreement guarantees that if The Qt Company ever fails to release an open-source version, or if the Qt project is neglected, the foundation has the right to release Qt under a BSD-style license.>>
- anamexis 5mo ago
  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/ https://www.escrowcompany.co/source-code-escrow/
  - flossly 5mo ago
    Did not know that... Thanks.
- Asooka 5mo ago
  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.
  - pabs3 5mo ago
    Why wouldn't the source code be useful? You might need old binaries to build it, but shove those in a VM and you should be good to go. If they used Debian, then they could even publish the exact snapshot.debian.org date to download the binaries from, and which binaries. Perhaps they had proprietary dependencies they couldn't get the code released for, but then you could port the source code to open equivalents.
TheAceOfHearts 5mo ago
That reminds me, do skilled players actually use the tilt keys? I remember being confused for years as to the purpose of tilt keys because I hadn't used a real pinball machine, and I can't remember it nudging the ball enough to merit the risk.
- SapporoChris 5mo ago
  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.
- toast0 5mo ago
  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.
- pessimizer 5mo ago
  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.
  - nonfamous 5mo ago
    This is all correct. To add some additional colour, the “slap save” is a form of tilting a beginner player can learn easily. If the ball is coming almost down the middle (but not exactly so), slap the flipper button of the closest flipper when the ball gets close. Slap it quickly with your flat hand. Slap it HARD. The sharp impulse won’t trigger the tilt mechanism, but it may displace the playfield just enough for the flipper to touch the ball when it otherwise wouldn’t. If all goes well the ball will deflect to the other (lowered) flipper, bounce off it, and allow you to continue play in front of your amazed friends.
diegomacario 5mo ago
Last year we shipped a pinball game at Shopify that took some inspiration from Space Cadet. You can still play it here: https://bfcm.shopify.com/ https://bfcm.shopify.com/ Every year we ship a live visualization of our merchant's sales on Black Friday. For a long time it was just a globe with arcs where each arc shows a real sale going from seller to buyer, but in the last few years we have been transforming the website into something more fun and interactive. I found programming a pinball machine to be quite challenging. We were a team of 2 engineers and 1 artist and we worked on that project for about a month and a half. We wrote some notes on the process and put them in the desktop computer next to the pinball machine if anyone is curious about how things work.
- HaZeust 5mo ago
  I love the pinball capture in the middle-far left that "throws" the ball with a mighty effortful groan! Thanks for linking this
- aa-jv 5mo ago
  I'm in the middle of a DIY pinball project - all design work and analysis at the moment, including getting a BARRACORA table for a few months to serve as inspiration. Got any tips and tricks for budding pinball designers? Maybe some notes that didn't make it yet .. ?
thesuperbigfrog 5mo ago
It is also available as a snap: https://snapcraft.io/space-cadet-pinball https://snapcraft.io/space-cadet-pinball
s20n 5mo ago
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.
- giancarlostoro 5mo ago
  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.
  - aykutseker 5mo ago
    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.
    - koolala 5mo ago
      Just need two AI for a second party.
      - rvnx 5mo ago
        That also was exposed to proprietary assets or binaries at some point during training
        koolala 5mo ago
        I don't think that counts.
        giancarlostoro 5mo ago
        I really doubt that any AI model was ever exposed to the original Space Cadet Pinball game.
wrwwww 5mo ago
[dead]
cbondurant 5mo ago
I like the idea mentioned of a source code escrow, and it feels like that would be a great place for national governments to step in. It reminds me of how the British Library requires that any published book have a copy sent to them for archival. Why not have similar laws in place for source code? If for no other reason than pure archival. I wouldn't mind at all if it was all just purely kept in a metaphorical locked vault, only to be opened after some special conditions regarding the support and lifespan of the software were met. Even if those terms were like, "only after the original copyright has expired", aka 70+ years, it would still be so much better for the state of preservation of source code over the current norms. We have games that have had their original source code lost in under a decade from their publication. (Kingdom Hearts 1) Any alternative is better than the current state of things.
- alberto-m 5mo ago
  > 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.
  - nottorp 5mo ago
    > 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. That is generally because they're on random sites that want you to subscribe for a year to read the one piece that was mentioned on the sites you read... not going to happen, sorry.
dvno42 5mo ago
Web based version for those feeling nostalgic https://lrusso.github.io/3DPinballSpaceCadet/ https://lrusso.github.io/3DPinballSpaceCadet/
eahm 5mo ago
You might want to check this one https://archive.org/details/vpinball-x-73-space-cadet https://archive.org/details/vpinball-x-73-space-cadet for Visual Pinball https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball. There are others that might be even better but JP's is the one that just works without installing and configuring a bunch of other software (https://youtube.com/results?search_query=JP%27s+Space+Cadet https://youtube.com/results?search_query=JP%27s+Space+Cadet - https://youtu.be/UXfohCzilrQ https://youtu.be/UXfohCzilrQ). Damn amazing how they are making these pinballs today. More tables here too: https://vpforums.org/index.php?app=downloads&showcat=50 https://vpforums.org/index.php?app=downloads&showcat=50 https://vpuniverse.com/files/category/82-vpx-pinball-tables https://vpuniverse.com/files/category/82-vpx-pinball-tables https://virtualpinballspreadsheet.github.io https://virtualpinballspreadsheet.github.io https://nailbuster.com/wikipinup https://nailbuster.com/wikipinup https://archive.org/search?query=visual+pinball+tables https://archive.org/search?query=visual+pinball+tables
- freeqaz 5mo ago
  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.
  - bsimpson 5mo ago
    I'd be curious to play a VR table, but the amount of tinkering required exceeds my curiosity.
  - eahm 5mo ago
    Not gonna lie, some tables require way too much work, every software today wants you to be an engineer with 20+ years of some specific experience, what about just double click and let me play the damn game?
    - mrandish 5mo ago
      Yeah, I hear you but as I mentioned in my reply to your other post there is a long-term silver-lining to having a bit of onboarding complexity. I think it's a big reason the VPin community is well into its second decade and still full of passionately committed contributors freely sharing awesome stuff. If you want drive-by casual pinball there are reasonably-priced pinball systems on PS5/XBox/Switch and Steam that are quite good. While VPin has gotten much easier in recent years, it's still a hobby that requires active engagement. VPin rewards that effort by enabling unbelievably high-quality, flexibility, customization, community enhancements and an ever-growing library of amazing content that'll take years to explore. I think the mismatch is when people see all these awesome pinball games "Fer Free!" and assume they're going to click Install and be playing in a couple minutes. I tell my friends to expect at least a half-hour before first play - and that they'll have to read and follow a couple pages of good (but not perfect) instructions to understand and configure a few different tools. If you want things to work reliably: * Stick to only Visual Pinball (not older emulators like Future Pinball). * Install it with Pinup Popper and set up your screen mapping and controls based on one of the standard default configs. * Run tables released or updated relatively recently (3 yrs or so). * Run tables from well-known release groups and authors (like Visual Pinball Workshop). * Wait to run newly released tables until they've been out a month, have >200 of downloads and >20 positive reviews. * Don't run add-ons which mod tables until you're experienced. And once you're past the install phase and have a bunch of tables fully working with all the bells and whistles you want, there's a new tool called VPin Studio that's great for maintaining your VPin system https://github.com/syd711/vpin-studio https://github.com/syd711/vpin-studio. Re Linux: I've only ever run VPin on Windows. I've seen posts from happy people who run it on Linux so apparently it can work very well but cross-platform is newer so there's less info on it. On Windows getting a full VPin install working is just a little cantankerous but no worse than you'd expect when you realize it's several open source hobby projects which pass data in various ways and aren't usually directly tested together.
lvirgili 5mo ago
It's so cool that we keep playing the games we "had to" (as they were what we have in the PC) when I was young. This week I've seen this guy do something I could never have when I was a child in this game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLukzzvvULU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLukzzvvULU
davidst 5mo ago
I am one of the original authors of Space Cadet Pinball and I just want to say it is absolutely wonderful there are people who love our old pinball game enough to keep it alive. You made my day. I am forwarding this post to my Cinematronics co-founders and friends, Mike Sandige (lead engineer) and Kevin Gliner (designer and product manager). They will enjoy seeing this as much as I did.
- bsimpson 5mo ago
  kgliner's Hacker News comment from last time is cited on Wikipedia!
- wilj 5mo ago
  My first time using NT 4, I was setting up a bunch of machines that needed babysitting, and Space Cadet Pinball got me through a lot of long, boring nights. I've thought back throughout my career to how lucky I was, it kept me from going crazy. Thank you!
- ndiddy 5mo ago
  Having a fun game bundled with every Windows install was really something special, so thanks for working on the game and selling it to Microsoft. Without it, we wouldn't have been able to have a Pinball league in my middle school typing class :) What parts of the game did you work on? Do you have any fun anecdotes about your time working on it, or stories about hard to find bugs?
  - davidst 5mo ago
    I was CEO of Cinematronics (to be clear, we were a tiny startup so a CEO title didn't mean much - everyone pitched in wherever they could help.) I negotiated the contract with Microsoft. My engineering contribution was not in the gameplay itself but in the game's memory manager and low-level rendering code. That was all performance-critical X86 assembly. I doubt any of that code lives on today. Yes, there were a lot of anecdotes and the story on Wikipedia is both incomplete and incorrect in some ways. One day, I'll get around to editing it. My memory is of promising it would be ready in time for Windows 95's launch, working excessively long hours, and focussing hard to make it fast enough so it would be fun to play on the minimum hardware requirement for Microsoft Plus.
INTPenis 5mo ago
I love this, I used to play this game a lot when I was bored at my brothers place, he only had a Windows computer. Just a few notes in the age of supply chain scares, don't install flatpak as root if you don't have to, and in this case you might want to use flatpak mask com.github.k4zmu2a.spacecadetpinball after installing, seeing as flatpak updates all its installed flatpaks otherwise. It's a project that hasn't seen updates in 2 years and really shouldn't see any updates considering its nature, so let's keep it that way.
azayrahmad 5mo ago
One thing that keeps me from playing the web port is its inability to store the high score leaderboard upon reload. I don't have a Linux desktop at the moment so I wonder if this problem is solved in this version.

354 points by jandeboevrie 5mo ago

Sooner or later I'll split the game from data so the second part will be easier, allowing custom flatpaks to extend data. The flatpak has received updates especially for keeping an up-to-date runtime but the upstream game, however, has not and Flathub will only show appstream data for the update. You can see on the flatpak manifest repo that latest commit is 6 months old: https://github.com/flathub/com.github.k4zmu2a.spacecadetpinball https://github.com/flathub/com.github.k4zmu2a.spacecadetpinb...

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

andai 5mo ago

Cool! I checked out the GitHub: https://github.com/k4zmu2a/SpaceCadetPinball https://github.com/k4zmu2a/SpaceCadetPinball It's been ported to a whole bunch of consoles. There's also a browser version! https://pinball.alula.me/ https://pinball.alula.me/ Also, turns out Space Cadet Pinball is part of a bigger Maxis game I never heard of: Full Tilt! Pinball. Also turns out we almost got DOOM bundled with Window 95! (GLUEM) but it was rejected: "Can't we just get a game of pinball or something like that?" And here we are :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Tilt!_Pinball#Development https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Tilt!_Pinball#Development

vikingerik 5mo ago
And the version from Full Tilt is a significantly enhanced version of the game. It has multiball, where the Windows bundled version doesn't.
- fsckboy 5mo ago
  i've gotten multiball in the Windows version of SpaceCadet, pretty sure I wasn't the victim of the Full Tilt version supply chain attack because while I knew about other tables I've never seen any of them.
nosrepa 5mo ago
The CEO refutes that they were working on doom elsewhere in this thread.
ramenat2am 5mo ago
I wonder if they didn't bundle Doom with Windows 95 because, by those days' standards, it was a pretty scary and violent game, and they didn't want to deal with any possible backlash?

nh2 5mo ago

I wish somebody had as a passion project or company to build Space Cadet into a real physical pinball table.

unleaded 5mo ago
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 https://files.catbox.moe/pnaeri.png
- stavros 5mo ago
  Hm what's the problem with that? I understand that the bumper extends down, but what else needs to be on the underside that makes this unbuildable?
  - BadBadJellyBean 5mo ago
    I think it's because the bumpers on top (the white things with the blue dot in the middle) need a lot of space underneath and the line runs through the space that they would need.
    - stavros 5mo ago
      Hm I understand the bumper part, but what does the line represent? Why does it need to run on the underside?
      - jjmarr 5mo ago
        The line represents a physical tunnel through which the ball can travel.
        stavros 5mo ago
        Oh, there's a hole at the top of the line that leads to an underground lane? That makes sense, I couldn't make that out in the photo, thanks.

eterm 5mo ago

I'm always surprised at the nostalgia for Space Cadet Pinball. Perhaps it was just chance that I grew up playing what seemed like a much better pinball game ( Hyper-3D Pinball, aka Tilt!* ), but I was always underwhelmed by Space Cadet Pinball on windows. In reality they're both pretty similar, I just happened to play a lot of one before the other, but the full screen DOS experience was much richer than what felt like a much more flat and less 3D windows experience. You can see some Hyper-3D Pinball / Tilt! gameplay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9ufwSkB0XQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9ufwSkB0XQ * Not to be confused with "Full Tilt!", from which space cadet pinball comes from.

MetaWhirledPeas 5mo ago
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.
peddling-brink 5mo ago
Some of us only had pinball. My parents didn’t buy games, so I got what was included.
ahartmetz 5mo ago
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 :)
- ahartmetz 5mo ago
  After watching a video, it seems like I misremembered the ball physics, but the rest seems more or less correct. The sound effects sound really cheap, the music... exists, and in the lower center of the table, there is... uh, a star-shaped gradient thing? That is usually where the most elaborate graphics of the table are! Like a cool spaceship or the space cadet or evil aliens or whatever.
5mo ago

unleaded 5mo ago

The Full Tilt version also has multiball which is missing from the Windows version. Lock a ball by shooting into a wormhole where the two lights are the same color, lock 3 balls to start. If you enjoy playing Space Cadet I would really recommend giving Visual Pinball a try. There are so many more pinball games better than Space Cadet, with amazing tables people have made for them all available for free. I think it's Windows only though (very, tables are all scripted in VBScript and PinMAME is loaded as a COM object). As an aside I tried to hack around with this and found out the programming for Space Cadet is pretty awful (not to disparage them or anything, it works). The state of the lights directly reflects the game state. (This is the cause of the bug where if you drain or start a mission while the rank-up light show is playing, you can skip a rank.)

jgtrosh 5mo ago
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.
MegaDeKay 5mo ago
> 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/vpinball.yml https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball/actions/workflows/vpinb... [1] https://discord.gg/BhR9h5aWm https://discord.gg/BhR9h5aWm [2] https://github.com/dekay/vpinball-wiki/wiki/About-Visual-Pinball https://github.com/dekay/vpinball-wiki/wiki/About-Visual-Pin... [3] https://github.com/dekay/vpin-cabinet/ https://github.com/dekay/vpin-cabinet/

stavros 5mo ago

Space Cadet wasn't bundled with Windows, was it? It was included in Microsoft Plus! 98 but not Windows 98.

GranPC 5mo ago
It was bundled with XP.
seba_dos1 5mo ago
It was, but in NT 4.0, 2000, Me and XP.
TazeTSchnitzel 5mo ago
Things included with Plus! packs were often rolled into subsequent versions of Windows, and Pinball is such an example.
chungy 5mo ago
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.
- sakjur 5mo ago
  Raymond Chen has two blog posts that first describes why Space Cadet was removed because of a 64-bit rounding mode bug and then a follow-up post a decade later clarifying that that might not be the full story. It's a fun bit of Windows history trivia. - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121218-00/?p=5803 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121218-00/?p=58... - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220106-00/?p=106122 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220106-00/?p=10...

adito 5mo ago

I was wondering why newer OS doesn't bundle games with their default installation anymore? Even on smartphone. I remember on old dumb phone (nokia I think), you can play snake and some racing game. It even has multiplayer via bluetooth.

RobotToaster 5mo ago
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.
b112 5mo ago
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)
morkalork 5mo ago
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
willis936 5mo ago
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?
WorldMaker 5mo ago
Space Cadet (Pinball) has the most direct answer: it was written largely in x86 assembler and didn't survive a 64-bit translation attempt. Raymond Chen says the ball would ghost off the table, fall down and end the game in seconds when trying to run in 64-bit math. Raymond even takes personal responsibility for the failure to keep Space Cadet alive and disappointment it didn't survive past Windows XP: https://web.archive.org/web/20160205141748/https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121218-00/?p=5803 https://web.archive.org/web/20160205141748/https://blogs.msd... The larger answer to the rest of the games seems to be related: Windows trying to shrink its non-cross platform code "liabilities" and things it needed to translate between processor architectures. The games were never a priority for the Windows team. Most were either intern projects and/or contracted from "second party vendors". In Windows 8, Microsoft decided to completely contract all of the games to a second party, the strange and sometimes controversial Arkadium [1]. The Arkadium Solitaire and Minesweeper were installed by default for a while, but as Arkadium started injecting more ads and also quickly increasing the install sizes of the games, Microsoft did the natural thing and removed them as default installs so people would stop complaining about their size and/or ads and instead just adding shortcuts to install them from the Store. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkadium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkadium

andreapaiola 5mo ago

Is it legal?

hggh 5mo ago
Who cares?
- bigstrat2003 5mo ago
  The guy you're responding to obviously cares. Being dismissive of his desire to do the right thing is kind of rude.
  - hggh 5mo ago
    Right thing == ethical != legal

flossly 5mo ago

I like the authors remark on "source code FLOSS escrow" at the bottom of the article. It's prolly hard to achieve legally, but the idea that a software is close source until it's no longer sold then automatically becomes open source would attract me as a potential user/buyer of the software: less lock-in in the worst-case scenario (being fully dependent on it wile company goes bust or decides to cancel the project). Reminds me a bit of the https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/ https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/ <<The "social contract" ensuring Qt remains open-source is primarily maintained through the KDE Free Qt Foundation, established in 1998. This agreement guarantees that if The Qt Company ever fails to release an open-source version, or if the Qt project is neglected, the foundation has the right to release Qt under a BSD-style license.>>

anamexis 5mo ago
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/ https://www.escrowcompany.co/source-code-escrow/
- flossly 5mo ago
  Did not know that... Thanks.
Asooka 5mo ago
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.
- pabs3 5mo ago
  Why wouldn't the source code be useful? You might need old binaries to build it, but shove those in a VM and you should be good to go. If they used Debian, then they could even publish the exact snapshot.debian.org date to download the binaries from, and which binaries. Perhaps they had proprietary dependencies they couldn't get the code released for, but then you could port the source code to open equivalents.

TheAceOfHearts 5mo ago

That reminds me, do skilled players actually use the tilt keys? I remember being confused for years as to the purpose of tilt keys because I hadn't used a real pinball machine, and I can't remember it nudging the ball enough to merit the risk.

SapporoChris 5mo ago
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.
toast0 5mo ago
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.
pessimizer 5mo ago
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.
- nonfamous 5mo ago
  This is all correct. To add some additional colour, the “slap save” is a form of tilting a beginner player can learn easily. If the ball is coming almost down the middle (but not exactly so), slap the flipper button of the closest flipper when the ball gets close. Slap it quickly with your flat hand. Slap it HARD. The sharp impulse won’t trigger the tilt mechanism, but it may displace the playfield just enough for the flipper to touch the ball when it otherwise wouldn’t. If all goes well the ball will deflect to the other (lowered) flipper, bounce off it, and allow you to continue play in front of your amazed friends.

diegomacario 5mo ago

Last year we shipped a pinball game at Shopify that took some inspiration from Space Cadet. You can still play it here: https://bfcm.shopify.com/ https://bfcm.shopify.com/ Every year we ship a live visualization of our merchant's sales on Black Friday. For a long time it was just a globe with arcs where each arc shows a real sale going from seller to buyer, but in the last few years we have been transforming the website into something more fun and interactive. I found programming a pinball machine to be quite challenging. We were a team of 2 engineers and 1 artist and we worked on that project for about a month and a half. We wrote some notes on the process and put them in the desktop computer next to the pinball machine if anyone is curious about how things work.

HaZeust 5mo ago
I love the pinball capture in the middle-far left that "throws" the ball with a mighty effortful groan! Thanks for linking this
aa-jv 5mo ago
I'm in the middle of a DIY pinball project - all design work and analysis at the moment, including getting a BARRACORA table for a few months to serve as inspiration. Got any tips and tricks for budding pinball designers? Maybe some notes that didn't make it yet .. ?

thesuperbigfrog 5mo ago

It is also available as a snap: https://snapcraft.io/space-cadet-pinball https://snapcraft.io/space-cadet-pinball

s20n 5mo ago

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.

giancarlostoro 5mo ago
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.
- aykutseker 5mo ago
  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.
  - koolala 5mo ago
    Just need two AI for a second party.
    - rvnx 5mo ago
      That also was exposed to proprietary assets or binaries at some point during training
      - koolala 5mo ago
        I don't think that counts.
      - giancarlostoro 5mo ago
        I really doubt that any AI model was ever exposed to the original Space Cadet Pinball game.

wrwwww 5mo ago

[dead]

cbondurant 5mo ago

I like the idea mentioned of a source code escrow, and it feels like that would be a great place for national governments to step in. It reminds me of how the British Library requires that any published book have a copy sent to them for archival. Why not have similar laws in place for source code? If for no other reason than pure archival. I wouldn't mind at all if it was all just purely kept in a metaphorical locked vault, only to be opened after some special conditions regarding the support and lifespan of the software were met. Even if those terms were like, "only after the original copyright has expired", aka 70+ years, it would still be so much better for the state of preservation of source code over the current norms. We have games that have had their original source code lost in under a decade from their publication. (Kingdom Hearts 1) Any alternative is better than the current state of things.

alberto-m 5mo ago
> 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.
- nottorp 5mo ago
  > 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. That is generally because they're on random sites that want you to subscribe for a year to read the one piece that was mentioned on the sites you read... not going to happen, sorry.

dvno42 5mo ago

Web based version for those feeling nostalgic https://lrusso.github.io/3DPinballSpaceCadet/ https://lrusso.github.io/3DPinballSpaceCadet/

eahm 5mo ago

You might want to check this one https://archive.org/details/vpinball-x-73-space-cadet https://archive.org/details/vpinball-x-73-space-cadet for Visual Pinball https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball. There are others that might be even better but JP's is the one that just works without installing and configuring a bunch of other software (https://youtube.com/results?search_query=JP%27s+Space+Cadet https://youtube.com/results?search_query=JP%27s+Space+Cadet - https://youtu.be/UXfohCzilrQ https://youtu.be/UXfohCzilrQ). Damn amazing how they are making these pinballs today. More tables here too: https://vpforums.org/index.php?app=downloads&showcat=50 https://vpforums.org/index.php?app=downloads&showcat=50 https://vpuniverse.com/files/category/82-vpx-pinball-tables https://vpuniverse.com/files/category/82-vpx-pinball-tables https://virtualpinballspreadsheet.github.io https://virtualpinballspreadsheet.github.io https://nailbuster.com/wikipinup https://nailbuster.com/wikipinup https://archive.org/search?query=visual+pinball+tables https://archive.org/search?query=visual+pinball+tables

freeqaz 5mo ago
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.
- bsimpson 5mo ago
  I'd be curious to play a VR table, but the amount of tinkering required exceeds my curiosity.
- eahm 5mo ago
  Not gonna lie, some tables require way too much work, every software today wants you to be an engineer with 20+ years of some specific experience, what about just double click and let me play the damn game?
  - mrandish 5mo ago
    Yeah, I hear you but as I mentioned in my reply to your other post there is a long-term silver-lining to having a bit of onboarding complexity. I think it's a big reason the VPin community is well into its second decade and still full of passionately committed contributors freely sharing awesome stuff. If you want drive-by casual pinball there are reasonably-priced pinball systems on PS5/XBox/Switch and Steam that are quite good. While VPin has gotten much easier in recent years, it's still a hobby that requires active engagement. VPin rewards that effort by enabling unbelievably high-quality, flexibility, customization, community enhancements and an ever-growing library of amazing content that'll take years to explore. I think the mismatch is when people see all these awesome pinball games "Fer Free!" and assume they're going to click Install and be playing in a couple minutes. I tell my friends to expect at least a half-hour before first play - and that they'll have to read and follow a couple pages of good (but not perfect) instructions to understand and configure a few different tools. If you want things to work reliably: * Stick to only Visual Pinball (not older emulators like Future Pinball). * Install it with Pinup Popper and set up your screen mapping and controls based on one of the standard default configs. * Run tables released or updated relatively recently (3 yrs or so). * Run tables from well-known release groups and authors (like Visual Pinball Workshop). * Wait to run newly released tables until they've been out a month, have >200 of downloads and >20 positive reviews. * Don't run add-ons which mod tables until you're experienced. And once you're past the install phase and have a bunch of tables fully working with all the bells and whistles you want, there's a new tool called VPin Studio that's great for maintaining your VPin system https://github.com/syd711/vpin-studio https://github.com/syd711/vpin-studio. Re Linux: I've only ever run VPin on Windows. I've seen posts from happy people who run it on Linux so apparently it can work very well but cross-platform is newer so there's less info on it. On Windows getting a full VPin install working is just a little cantankerous but no worse than you'd expect when you realize it's several open source hobby projects which pass data in various ways and aren't usually directly tested together.

lvirgili 5mo ago

It's so cool that we keep playing the games we "had to" (as they were what we have in the PC) when I was young. This week I've seen this guy do something I could never have when I was a child in this game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLukzzvvULU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLukzzvvULU

davidst 5mo ago

I am one of the original authors of Space Cadet Pinball and I just want to say it is absolutely wonderful there are people who love our old pinball game enough to keep it alive. You made my day. I am forwarding this post to my Cinematronics co-founders and friends, Mike Sandige (lead engineer) and Kevin Gliner (designer and product manager). They will enjoy seeing this as much as I did.

bsimpson 5mo ago
kgliner's Hacker News comment from last time is cited on Wikipedia!
wilj 5mo ago
My first time using NT 4, I was setting up a bunch of machines that needed babysitting, and Space Cadet Pinball got me through a lot of long, boring nights. I've thought back throughout my career to how lucky I was, it kept me from going crazy. Thank you!
ndiddy 5mo ago
Having a fun game bundled with every Windows install was really something special, so thanks for working on the game and selling it to Microsoft. Without it, we wouldn't have been able to have a Pinball league in my middle school typing class :) What parts of the game did you work on? Do you have any fun anecdotes about your time working on it, or stories about hard to find bugs?
- davidst 5mo ago
  I was CEO of Cinematronics (to be clear, we were a tiny startup so a CEO title didn't mean much - everyone pitched in wherever they could help.) I negotiated the contract with Microsoft. My engineering contribution was not in the gameplay itself but in the game's memory manager and low-level rendering code. That was all performance-critical X86 assembly. I doubt any of that code lives on today. Yes, there were a lot of anecdotes and the story on Wikipedia is both incomplete and incorrect in some ways. One day, I'll get around to editing it. My memory is of promising it would be ready in time for Windows 95's launch, working excessively long hours, and focussing hard to make it fast enough so it would be fun to play on the minimum hardware requirement for Microsoft Plus.

INTPenis 5mo ago

I love this, I used to play this game a lot when I was bored at my brothers place, he only had a Windows computer. Just a few notes in the age of supply chain scares, don't install flatpak as root if you don't have to, and in this case you might want to use flatpak mask com.github.k4zmu2a.spacecadetpinball after installing, seeing as flatpak updates all its installed flatpaks otherwise. It's a project that hasn't seen updates in 2 years and really shouldn't see any updates considering its nature, so let's keep it that way.

azayrahmad 5mo ago

One thing that keeps me from playing the web port is its inability to store the high score leaderboard upon reload. I don't have a Linux desktop at the moment so I wonder if this problem is solved in this version.