Space Cadet Pinball on Linux(brennan.io) |
Space Cadet Pinball on Linux(brennan.io) |
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.
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?
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.
I've thought back throughout my career to how lucky I was, it kept me from going crazy. Thank you!
SCP has had such a massive influence in my life up to the point of getting into the real world of pinball and becoming semi-professional (or the step prior as pro pinball doesn't exist in this part of the world, yet..).
I've been wanting to ask this forever and until this morning, would have thought I'd have brought this question to my grave:
Would you ever consider going back to the drawing board in an attempt to produce an official follow-up to Space Cadet Pinball?
There are a few generations of people who may be yearning for nostalgia in a world of enshittification, micro-transactions and even worse in the virtual pinball scenes, licensing bullshit that never favors the player.
Disclaimer: I've possibly put too much thought into this already, am willing to put everything I have into this if ever needed... but will need to let you comment first :)
What part of the world are you in that doesn't have a professional pinball tournament roster? Just curious ..
We reached out to Microsoft a few years ago and offered to create a new version at no charge if they would restore it to Windows but they turned us down. There appeared to be no interest on their part.
I'm an external contractor for Software Heritage, not sure if they are currently working on it, but I think they would be an ideal organisation to play that role.
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.
edit: It does! I installed the AUR version of it that was linked in the repo README and tested it out, and typing "hidden test" during the game startup sequence lets me drag the ball
https://github.com/k4zmu2a/SpaceCadetPinball
It's been ported to a whole bunch of consoles. There's also a browser version!
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
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.
Got any tips and tricks for budding pinball designers? Maybe some notes that didn't make it yet .. ?
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.)
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/
<<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.>>
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.
Damn amazing how they are making these pinballs today.
More tables here too:
https://vpforums.org/index.php?app=downloads&showcat=50
https://vpuniverse.com/files/category/82-vpx-pinball-tables
https://virtualpinballspreadsheet.github.io
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.
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.
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.
While we’re at it, I’d love to see a physical version of the seseame street pinbal table [2], though that one might be a bit more ambitious. :)
One could have the ball go quite low below the table surface and then use some kind of mechanical kicker to get it up to table level again near the bottom. It's possibly a unique problem, but seems to be much less work than building the rest of the table.
You might be able to make the kickback lane work with a subway or maybe make the machine a widebody and go around the mess?
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.
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.
It's a fun bit of Windows history trivia.
- https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121218-00/?p=58... - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220106-00/?p=10...
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.
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.
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
* Not to be confused with "Full Tilt!", from which space cadet pinball comes from.
You can see on this thread that the original developers of Space Cadet Pinball think this is a neat project so I don't see anything morally wrong either.
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/vpinb...
[1] https://discord.gg/BhR9h5aWm
[2] https://github.com/dekay/vpinball-wiki/wiki/About-Visual-Pin...
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.
My GPU is an AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT, if that makes a difference.
last time i tried on Debian it just worked... their developer testing app also works flawlessly on Android. Arch Linux has an AUR package with the last git and i updated it yesterday and played a bit before bed
Much like the MAME project is preserving arcade games before they are lost, the VPin community is doing historical preservation so future generations can enjoy these electro-mechanical machines. Under the hood in Visual Pinball the pinball machine ROMs are emulated by a special version of MAME called PinMAME, while Visual Pinball does the 3D rendering and physics simulation.
The majority of users play VPin on desktop with a keyboard but in the same way some MAME players add dedicated arcade buttons and joysticks or even a dedicated arcade cabinet, VPin supports running in a cabinet which looks like a pinball machine but has a flat-screen where the playfield would be as well as flipper buttons and a real plunger to launch the virtual ball.
VPin supports stereo sound but can also use the extra channels from a standard PC sound card's 7.1 output to drive effects like a subwoofer, bass shaker and up to four channels of positional haptic feedback for realism you don't just hear but feel. I was shocked at how accurately the transducers recreate the feel of real pinball bumpers and slingshots firing inside the cabinet down to the subtle vibration of a metal ball rolling across a wood playfield. In my cabinet I even added flipper solenoids from a pinball machine under the screen where the flippers are rendered. I can vouch for the net effect feeling authentic since my VPin cab sits in our game room next to 8 real pinball machines and a custom MAME arcade cab.
If you're interested in trying out Visual Pinball I strongly recommend starting with the Pinup Popper auto-installer that @eahm linked above (https://nailbuster.com/wikipinup/doku.php). All of this amazing goodness is the result of several different projects which work seamlessly together but installing it all in the right order and places can be confusing the first-time. Having to actually RTFM a bit to do my first install was slightly annoying but I now realize not being one-click user friendly is an upside. It keeps the VPin hobby in that ideal zone where it's just complex enough to limit drive-by casuals from mob spamming an otherwise super-fun, completely free, retro-adjacent hobby and that's why there's still a highly-engaged, knowledgeable community.
We wouldn't want to leave any money on the table in the pursuit of a better product, would we?
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.
(I can't imagine any other reason why, except maybe bug reports)
I still applaud the Linux version for its hack value :)
Other pinball games are bland and boring to me.
And yeah, I'm a big fan, too. I still have the CDs for it, and it still runs in Windows 11!
...also it was what you played when you had no internet
A friend told you about an article, or a headline piqued your interest.
You could anonymously hand a negligible payment (few cents or dollars in cash) to an intermediary (the newspaper seller at the street corner) to get access to all the content published for a certain time period (daily/weekly/monthly issue of the publication).
Now a "friend" (for example a HN post) still tells you about an article. Unfortunately you can't get an issue, they want an ongoing commitment. It's not anonymous, you have to create an account. The intermediaries are gone though, is that a good thing?
I didn't know about this. Not sure if the developers settled or take two gave up. I would guess the latter as the decompilation / port scene seems to be going strong. Though I don't follow it that closely.
A bit like Star Trek teleportation.. is it you, or a copy of you?
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.
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.
Good ol' days indeed! That picturesque glimpse of the past brings a smile to my face! I didn't get more than 1 chance to play physical machines back in the day and only started in the last decade with a machine popping up at my office, to which I became the defacto repairman after it needing maintenance regularly.
I'm located in Prague, Czechia. The pinball scene in the country is basically held by two groups of people: those previously working in the gambling scene changing up their ways and going into the arcade scene, overcharging for tables (3$ dollars and up for 1 game, bought by in-house credits) or the older pinball scene and owners who have been milking out old tables for years on very reduced maintenance cycles, which results in rarely fully working tables.
Despite there being 1 local tournament, one of these options offers anything near IFPA standards.
Geographically speaking and as seen on the pinside map[0], France and Spain have very little areas where there are no machines whileas Germany has barely none. The reason being is that Germany has introduced entertainment laws at require businesses to pay for any machines they may offer to their patrons, resulting in table operators operating at a loss most of the time. That also stops the scene from crossing the border as it virtually doesn't exist, Spanish and French tourists do not come here for pinball whatsoever.
Move further east to Czechia and you have a very small population where most people do not know of the game or even less its local name of "Flipper". Businesses that have went into the pinball scene recently have failed miserably for various reasons but mainly due to pricing/bad business models and lack of international advertising.
Despite the grim situation over here, I'm aware that some efforts are persisting into getting another place set up so the dream of getting an IFPA chapter here is not dead!
Happy to hear your thoughts on it all!
[0] https://pinside.com/pinball/map/mapbox#5.89/49.472/14.274/0/...
I have a plan to visit the Pinball Museum in Krakow (Poland) some time this summer .. perhaps similar jaunts are worth the effort? I know for a fact you could come to Vienna for the weekend and get quite satiated, if only at the Prater .. ;)
I do need to get out of the country soon for a weekend and the Viennese recommendation does sound nice! Looking at the Pinside map[0], there are a few hundred tables to try in the city! I might have to hit you up somehow whenever I finalize travel plans. Also, a few friends have been mentioning the Budapest Pinball museum lately so the idea of visiting there was also in the cards for this summer on top of ?Krakow? (didn't know about that!)
Leasing a table is indeed nice.. I opted to purchase one in an attempt to build a collection but that effort fizzled out but still have a table a few hundred km across the border waiting for me to pick up. I think the universe has better plans tho.. will need to wait and see :)
[0] https://pinside.com/pinball/map/mapbox#10.73/48.1852/16.4336...
Thanks for the prompt reasonse!
I'm inclined to think that the landscape a few years ago has changed drastically and today's world is a lot different: Microsoft is now one of the world's largest gaming houses with their purchases of Mojang, ZeniMax and Activision/Blizzard and the dust from those mergers (should) have settled. A vision for the immediate and near future would certainly be different.
Add the fact that Windows 11 currently has a very poor overall impression with its user base and have publicly pledged that they will work to improve their operating system offering.
There's also a new Xbox leader, Asha Sharma, who has decided to change how the Xbox division is being managed, leading to new ways on how to improve their overall share of the gaming market.
All of the above pertains only towards the initial conception of how Space Cadet was introduced to a generation of fans focused on Microsoft. And despite it being a unique opportunity, it may only be applicable back then. That is no longer necessary now in today's age as you already have an established name, product and reputation. And on the flip side, going the no-charge to previous benefactors may even be detrimental to the overall goal without considering existing gaming solutions like Steam or GoG.
I'd be bold to ask why would you even need their blessing to release an updated or new version but would be quick to dismiss the hurdle as unnecessary, when there are other options and people out there to support your brand and product and to see that your fans blessed are with another table after such a long time.
Looking forward to your feedback!
-x
edit: elusive missing comma
My Cinematronics co-founders and I do not own the rights to any of the games we created. Cinematronics was acquired by Maxis, and Maxis was later acquired by Electronic Arts (who are being acquired, as well.) The rights would have to be untangled which was, I suspect, part of the hesitation Microsoft had in moving forward.
Didn't know much about the Budapest Pinball museum, but yeah - that's what fellow enthusiasts are for! I'll add that to the Day Trip roster, since Budapest is absolutely gorgeous this time of year .. but I'll do the Krakow day trip in the next few weeks, since it'll be a new (and fascinating) city for me, whereas I've been lost in Budapest too many times to count so far, lol ..
I'm not .. quite yet .. at the point where I will purchase a table, but leasing one for a few months has been very, very rewarding - it was an immediate catalyst for cohesion and mirth among my circle .. we're even printing t-shirts for our Pinball Gang this weekend, hehe.
May your balls drain to great bonus and your bumpers drop like they know how to score!
> In 1994, the company began development of a port of Doom.
No, we were never porting Doom and we used none of Doom's code or resources. And I didn't propose to tone down the violence. The game was intended to be a fun first-person shooter in the same spirit as Doom but that was the only connection.
Microsoft was involved in a high-profile antitrust suit with the Department of Justice at the time. They were understandably sensitive about the potential PR impact of this type of game shipping with Windows and proposed gameplay design changes to reduce the violence.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinematronics,_LLC
Hasn't been edited since December 2024. Has never mentioned DOOM.
While today's gaming landscape is a bit different with hundreds of millions of pc's are running windows, it'd be a quick boon at getting a product out there and promoting the pinball scene (a bit cheeky for other gaming devs but I digress..).. Since it's been a few years, why not reach out to the Microsoft team once more and see what they have to say?
Alternatively, in a potentially smaller yet equally good view, Space Commander Pinball sounds like a great sequel which may not have the legal hurdles currently faced with Cadet. A potential follow-up could be Space Admiral Pinball, allowing the audience to follow through with a full career within the Pinball Space Force.
Whichever route you take, I wish you the best of luck and success! If you ever need to bounce ideas off of, it would be nice to keep in touch.
-X
Indeed the sources say Doom clone, not port.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Full_Tilt!_Pinbal...
The kickback puts the ball into the left orbit, which is at ground level, the ball will hit the spinner and then IIRC cause it's outside the crop, it goes into the lanes at the top of the playfield, and into the pop bumper area there.
