Windows Pinball

[Sam I Am]

Anyone play it? Used to play it? It was a pretty good game, but many of you probably have noticed that the last Windows OS it appeared in was Windows XP and there was no reason given why. Well, there is one now. Raymond Chen from Microsoft posted to his blog about it.

Original Post.

Windows XP was the last client version of Windows to include the Pinball game that had been part of Windows since Windows 95. There is apparently speculation that this was done for legal reasons.

No, that's not why.

One of the things I did in Windows XP was port several millions of lines of code from 32-bit to 64-bit Windows so that we could ship Windows XP 64-bit Edition. But one of the programs that ran into trouble was Pinball. The 64-bit version of Pinball had a pretty nasty bug where the ball would simply pass through other objects like a ghost. In particular, when you started the game, the ball would be delivered to the launcher, and then it would slowly fall towards the bottom of the screen, through the plunger, and out the bottom of the table.

Games tended to be really short.

Two of us tried to debug the program to figure out what was going on, but given that this was code written several years earlier by an outside company, and that nobody at Microsoft ever understood how the code worked (much less still understood it), and that most of the code was completely uncommented, we simply couldn't figure out why the collision detector was not working. Heck, we couldn't even find the collision detector!

We had several million lines of code still to port, so we couldn't afford to spend days studying the code trying to figure out what obscure floating point rounding error was causing collision detection to fail. We just made the executive decision right there to drop Pinball from the product.

If it makes you feel better, I am saddened by this as much as you are. I really enjoyed playing that game. It was the location of the one Windows XP feature I am most proud of.

Update: Hey everybody asking that the source code be released: The source code was licensed from another company. If you want the source code, you have to go ask them.

[Phoenix]

Wonder what the source code was even written in?

But yeah, whoever the company is that holds the rights to that, if they were to release it to open source, that would be great. It would be working in 64-bit before the next day was done.

[StevenOtero]

You're welcome: http://mspinball.weebly.com/ | http://mspinball.weebly.com/download.html

"Microsoft Windows Pinbal, or 3D Space Cadet Pinball was introduced in Microsoft Plus 95, it then became so popular that it was included in Microsoft Windows NT 4 by default. Microsoft then provided instructions to install it form the Plus 95 CD into Windows 98, it was also included with ME, 2000 and XP. Unfortunately, Microsoft Pinball died a slow and painful death with the release of Windows Vista, or did it?

Today I have succesfully ported over all of the files of Microsoft Pinball for Windows XP to Windows Vista And 7 and it is fully functional, below you can see the screenshot of pinball running in Windows 7 and the about box, this is not photoshoped, this is the real deal!"

[Sam I Am]

Originally Posted by StevenOtero

You're welcome: http://mspinball.weebly.com/ | http://mspinball.weebly.com/download.html

"Microsoft Windows Pinbal, or 3D Space Cadet Pinball was introduced in Microsoft Plus 95, it then became so popular that it was included in Microsoft Windows NT 4 by default. Microsoft then provided instructions to install it form the Plus 95 CD into Windows 98, it was also included with ME, 2000 and XP. Unfortunately, Microsoft Pinball died a slow and painful death with the release of Windows Vista, or did it?

Today I have succesfully ported over all of the files of Microsoft Pinball for Windows XP to Windows Vista And 7 and it is fully functional, below you can see the screenshot of pinball running in Windows 7 and the about box, this is not photoshoped, this is the real deal!"

It looks a bit grainy and the ball sometimes moves so fast that you can't see it on the screen. Definitely not a clean port, but it does work.

[Sam I Am]

If you have an Android device, there is a pinball game called Pinball Classic that pretty much is a knockoff of the Windows Pinball, but the colors of the table are different. It plays just like it almost. Definitely a good pickup.

Pinball Classic @ Google Play

[ShiningStar]

dumb question, is pinball dead?