7 ms·
Why was Pinball removed from Windows Vista? (2012)
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- isaacdl 12y agoI volunteer to invest the time to port it :).
- thisjepisje 12y agoYou can download it here: http://www.techspot.com/downloads/5697-microsoft-pinball-for-windows-vista-7.html http://www.techspot.com/downloads/5697-microsoft-pinball-for... Works for me on Windows 7.
- yincrash 12y agoThis appears to be a fan port with no credit listed for the porting process[1]. It's interesting that it was released 10 days after the old new thing article was written. Hopefully it's clean. [1]https://web.archive.org/web/20130127144603/http://mspinball.weebly.com/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20130127144603/http://mspinball....
- mmaunder 12y agoCode needs constant loving eyes on it or rigor mortis sets in and it's almost impossible to revive.
- shurcooL 12y agoOne 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 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.
- richbradshaw 12y agoMicrosoft beat you to it: http://hover.ie/ http://hover.ie/
- dbloom 12y agoNeither of this looks anything like the Hover! that actually came on the Windows 95 CD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQa3OM6zBJ4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQa3OM6zBJ4
- shurcooL 12y agoThe was more than 1 game with the name "Hover". However, this one had really fun physics-driven gameplay that made it unlike any other game.
- notastartup 12y agoI ended up going through a wall and got stuck in a room with no exit.
- jsmeaton 12y agoHeh so did I. Kinda funny how the original post was related to collision detection in a different game.
- sentientmachine 12y agoWindows 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.
- fakeanon 12y agoIt was removed before Windows 8.
- macspoofing 12y agoNo, I don't think so.
- codeflo 12y agoAnd presumably, they couldn't just ship the (still working) 32-bit executable because... politics.
- omh 12y agoFrom a comment on that blog: That would have been even more work, because there was at the time no infrastructure in Setup for having 32-bit-only components. (And then automatically uninstalling it when WOW64 was disabled.) And besides, all the people who criticized Windows 95 as "not really a 32-bit operating system because it has some parts in 16-bit" would use the same logic to say that 64-bit Windows is "not really a 64-bit operating system."
- codeflo 12y agoThanks, I didn't read the comments. The technical point is probably not the whole truth: Vista 64-bit shipped with a 32-bit Internet Explorer for plugin compatibility. So there must have been some kind of setup infrastructure. The "besides" point is what I was expecting: there was some kind of rule not to ship 32-bit-only components to claim "full 64-bit support". A rule that was mindlessly applied even to a little game that has nothing to do with the core OS. As I said, politics. (Not that I personally care, but I've observed that people love those builtin games.)
- acqq 12y agoAnd I still miss the cat as the "office assistant" (it's much nicer than Clippy). Not to do anything useful, just to react there on the screen while the office work is done. Really.
- daigoba66 12y agoTo this day, IE is still typically ran in its 32bit variant due to plugins. There are probably dozens of included executables that are 32bit only.
- TD-Linux 12y agoThe 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.
- mschuster91 12y agoAnyone 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 :)
- JelteF 12y agoMaybe add 2012 to the title?
- hrbrtglm 12y agoIf 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 ?
- cyphax 12y agoWord 97, I remember! :) Excel 97 had a similar thing where you'd fly around in 3d, over generated terrain. I think the pinball game included in Word was extremely basic but it was nice to see the developers got to include them.
- joshschreuder 12y agoHere it is: http://www.eeggs.com/items/763.html http://www.eeggs.com/items/763.html
- tokenadult 12y agoAlways 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.
- lnanek2 12y agoThe comments mention the developers wrote it in x86 assembly, but that it was later converted to C automatically, so maybe it lost any comments it had at that point. Other commenters pointed out it was just a stripped down version of a Maxis game, so maybe the comments were stripped before selling it to Microsoft to make them more likely to hire the source company again for any more work. If the company was selling pin ball games to multiple companies using a shared code base, might make sense.
- wizardhat 12y agoWell that's just sad. Pinball was dropped because of incompetent programmers. Don't 32-bit binaries work on 64-bit anyways?
- thought_alarm 12y agoIt was dropped because Microsoft felt it was inappropriate or embarrassing to ship an app that they themselves could not port to 64-bit, at a time when they were asking 3rd party developers to do the same.
- Titanbase 12y agoAs the article states, this is incorrect. It could have been converted to 64-bit, but they didn't have the time.
- SEMW 12y agoRaymond address that in his reply to the first comment on TFA. "That would have been even more work, because there was at the time no infrastructure in Setup for having 32-bit-only components. (And then automatically uninstalling it when WOW64 was disabled.) ..."
- extempore 12y agoThe offhand dismissal of Raymond Chen as an "incompetent programmer" captures the hacker news zeitgeist.
- mikeash 12y agoI agree with your sentiment, but I don't think he's pointing the finger at Chen.
- timmaah 12y agoSo Microsoft openly admits they shipped code with their operating system that they did not review or even understand what it contained.
- macspoofing 12y agouh huh.
- pjmlp 12y agoAs if any company reviews that much the code they get from out-sourcing and off-shoring.
- gaius 12y agoI'll wager you're one of these guys who uses a "framework" for your website without batting an eyelid, or reading every line of code...
- yuhong 12y agoCan 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)
- mappu 12y agoMon dieu! There IS a PINBALL.EX_ on the XP x64 cd, and it expands to a 64-bit executable.
- Theodores 12y agoPinball 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.
- cmdrfred 12y agoI feel the same way, XP was a beast. It got dusty in the room when I played that 'Escape from Windows XP' game. She will be missed. (And still probably used in China for many years to come)
- notacoward 12y agoThe 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.
- gus_massa 12y agoThe direct link to the first comment of the developer is http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/12/18/10378851.aspx#10379160 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/12/18/10378...
- phpnode 12y agoMost of the comments on that article are really depressing, ill considered mumblings from armchair programmers.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- kazinator 12y agoIf you want to play a great, classic pinball game, install an Apple II emulator and look for a disk image of Night Mission Pinball.
- DiabloD3 12y agoPinball 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.
- Titanbase 12y agoPinball was more popular with everyone I knew because you could see the whole table. It was fantastic on my friend's giant 21" CRT! Android wasn't as fun because it scrolled, and you couldn't see anything except a tiny slice where the ball was.
- biot 12y agoThere are some great comments from the last time this was submitted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4938348 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4938348
- orionblastar 12y agoAs 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.
- nileshtrivedi 12y agoAll they needed to write is a collision detector detector!