I am one of the original authors of Space Cadet pinball (along with Mike Sandige, lead programmer, and Kevin Gliner, producer and designer.) It is surprising and gratifying to see interest is still alive for our old game. And I can't help but be impressed by the ingenuity shown by both the decompiling effort and the playable web-based game.
I'm impressed as well! It's exciting to see folks so enthusiastic about the game.
I took a deeper look at the github project. It's been a long time since I worked on the Space Cadet code, but the decompiled github code is pretty familiar. It's formatted differently of course, but I think it's actually better than the original.
And, nice! Check it out David and Kevin: k4zmu2a got the quotes in! https://github.com/k4zmu2a/SpaceCadetPinball/blob/master/Spa...
Now I'll never live down how long I spent working on the flippers.
Bonus points for anyone who knows why the classes in the source are prefixed with a 'T'!
From wikipedia: "...[Danny Thorpe] in 1994 while at Borland, he contracted with Santa Cruz startup Cinematronics (David Stafford and Mike Sandige) to build a component model and collision physics engine for a software pinball game. Cinematronics licensed an early version of the pinball engine to Microsoft"
Maybe Borland and Delphi has something to do with the 'T' prefixes.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Thorpe
Yep, this is the reason. Danny's initial code used Delphi with this convention. I'm not actually sure why that convention is used there, though. I remember asking Danny why, and I think his answer was just that was the Delphi convention. But it's been a while, so perhaps I have forgotten the details of his answer. I later had to migrate to C++ to integrate with the Windows build. And I retained the naming convention, mostly because it was quicker than changing it and I didn't have a lot of time. But I was always uncomfortable with the T prefix on the ramp class.
I remember using lots of T classes back in the early 90s when I was building software using Turbo Vision, a text user-interface framework bundled with Borland C++ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Vision)
Absolutely not. "T" prefix stands for "type" and has its roots in case-insensitive Pascal
/* eg common C style notation involving type identifier and var identifier is illegal in Pascal */
Rect rect;
(* so Pascal requires some distinct identifiers eg *)
rect: TRect;
the other common prefix is "P" which stands for pointer type
Thanks to both of you. It took me a while to realize the depth built in. I tried making a pinball game many moons ago but couldn't get the ball to "feel" right (flippers as well).
How was that process? Did you go play physical tables, go for a realistic approach, or tweak magic numbers until it "felt right"?
We played every table we could get our hands on. Also rented tables weekly to be brought into the office once we moved to Austin. I tried to dig as deeply into the history of pinball too, to understand why tables had evolved the way they had.
Mike (Sandige) built a scripting system that allowed me to tweak the physics, materials, etc. of each component. But our constant exposure to real tables helped us form a "feels right" baseline to target. I also applied whatever I'd learned at that point about game design fundamentals (it was early in my career).
After we finished 3D Pinball and started on Full Tilt, I got put in touch with a seasoned designer of real pinball tables who had worked on some hits from the 70s. He took me to task for a bunch of mistakes I made in 3D Pinball, and some of those corrections found their way into the Full Tilt version of Space Cadet (and more so in the other tables in Full Tilt).
Kevin Gliner (designer and producer for 3D Pinball, etc)
Always interesting to see the things hidden in games. When I was in the biz I was aware of many easter eggs, a lot of which are still unknown to the public.
Has to be ported, since Delphi doesn't generate PDB7's.
Or at least written by someone familiar/used to Delphi, since Age of Empires utility classes are also prefixed with T, but the game was obviously written in Visual Studio - but some dev tools were written in Delphi, so somebody seems to have taken the naming scheme from there in that case.
yep, this is it. The project started out in Delphi, but I had to port it to C to integrate with the Windows Build. For some reason they didn't want to include Delphi tooling in the Windows build.
These were just a fun little Easter egg that made us smile. Typing the right code displayed memorable quotes collected from various folks at Cinematronics in the hectic time we were developing Space Cadet. Maybe I can find some time to check with the folks that they are ok with it, I can put together a commit that comments who said them. I don't recall who said all of them, but I'm sure David and Kevin can fill in my gaps.
There was a more deeply hidden Easter egg that shows the credits as well. Code to trigger that is not in this repo, though.
This quote is mine, and is related to a game we were working on for Microsoft before we pivoted to pinball. There was a bug - probably mine - where the game displayed the previous state for an object, but the object had changed state, so the resulting behavior was confusing. 'she' and 'glue bottle' were referring to imagery used for the placeholder prototype artwork. I was trying to explain what was going on, and it made sense, but only in that incredibly constrained context. Outside of that context it's nonsense, but that's what makes it memorable and humorous to us.
I can't help but wonder for old closed-source utilities and games like this: whatever happened to the original source code?
Is it still around, stashed in a vault a MSFT, or is it lost for ever?
Do you know?
And what would it take to convince a large corp. like MSFT to actually release the original under some open source license ... not like the thing has much value by now other than historical.
The rights belong to Electronic Arts today. They acquired Maxis who had acquired us (Cinematronics.) Microsoft may still have rights to continue publishing a version with the Windows operating system.
Microsoft, if you're reading this, we would be glad to provide assistance in getting 3D Pinball running again on the latest Windows OS.
Given that the reason it was removed was IA-64 which isn't a thing anymore... this should be plausible. But also given where MS has gone with games as late I'd be surprised if they do. EA should just release all of Full Tilt! Pinball on steam or GoG if they haven't already.
It was removed for Vista, because it couldn't transition to AMD64. This was after Microsoft had essentially completely ditched Itanium.
(I'd love to see a GOG or Steam or even Origin release of Full Tilt Pinball, though. The Full Tilt version of Space Cadet is better-- higher-resolution graphics plus some gameplay tweaks.)
[edit] Digging a little deeper, that might not be entirely true. The first consumer version of Windows it didn't appear in was Vista, but it sounds like the decision to drop Pinball was made during the XP era (even though it shipped with x86 Windows XP). So issues with the IA64 port (or with another architecture) might've been the reason it was dropped, then that decision was not revisited for Vista even if Pinball might've worked under AMD64 Windows.
Actually 3d Pinball is available in the AMD64 Window XP 64 bit versions. It was not available (sort of... it's there but not actually installed from media) on IA-64 versions. There was a youtuber that dug into it (probably at the cost of far too much of their own sanity). So there is no "might have" it works (albeit with some rendering issues).
There were a couple of interviews with gaming magazines years ago. They would be hard to find today and didn't cover the topics you mentioned. Mike, Kevin, and I, really need to get together to tell the story some day.
I played it before it was bundled with Windows, at the time I didn't think that much of it (I was more into Epic Pinball, spent so much time on the shareware version with the android themed board <_<), but it was a game we'd fire up Windows for. We probably got it off one of those shareware CD's, but I don't recall. Might have been off a diskette?
Thank you sir, you brought many many hours of enjoyment to my childhood. I remember being excited to go to my Aunt's house because she had a computer with Windows XP (my family only had Windows 2000) and I could play your game.
And only on hacker news will I be replying to one of the authors.
This game blew my mind! How did you get the physics to be so realistic? At the time I tried a number of different pinball implementations and unrealistic physics was a big problem.
Thanks! We modeled collision boundaries with high resolution, and tried to use physically appropriate material settings. But this had to run on relatively slow machines, so the physics model itself was pretty basic. Except for the flippers. I really wanted them to feel like physical flippers - predictable, controllable, and without computational problems that let the ball pass through them sometimes. :( I put lots of time into the flippers, and had some trouble balancing those requirements with the available CPU - it wouldn't do to have the game slow down to figure out how the ball should move when you hit the flippers.
I noted this in another reply, but Mike had written a scripting model that let me adjust the physics and materials for each component separately. That allowed me to iterate rapidly when tuning the feel of the game. A solid physics engine is a pre-requisite, but what you do with it from there is also critical (and the goal was to replicate how real world tables felt, not how they actually behaved).
I remember this, Dave. I was confident I had the fastest possible algorithm and you proved me wrong. It was a humbling experience but it forced me to throw out my assumptions and start over. It taught me to assume there was always a faster or better way just waiting to be discovered. TANSTATFC
The article makes a good point but I wonder if it is an incomplete explanation. What would happen if Linus Torvalds walked away and there was no single leader to guide (or "dictate", depending on your point of view) its development? Would it begin to fragment and exhibit signs of Conway's Law?
I believe the answer is, yes, it would. While Linus is a stubborn and opinionated leader ("Benevolent Dictator For Life") it is those qualities, coupled with his extremely high standards, that have preserved the coherence of Linux's system architecture all this time.
I wonder if there are any large, successful open source projects that are leaderless and function well without a social hierarchy?
If non-hierarchical social structures are really more effective, such examples should be easy to find, no?
On the other hand, maybe their absence only indicates that online communities simply tend to mirror the social structures of offline communities, or that they're just mostly made up of people who prefer hierarchies.
tl;dr - hierarchies will form whether you want them to or not. If you refuse to endorse an official structure, you'll simply get an unofficial (and more often than not, unaccountable) one instead.
You just brought back old memories for me. I wrote the heap manager for Borland C. I chose the next-fit algorithm for its balance of speed and reasonable fragmentation under common use cases. Best-fit performs exactly as you described.
I pulled out my old Minix (1987) book, which I keep for nostalgia. Tanenbaum on p. 202 writes:
> The simplest algorithm is first fit... A minor variation of first fit is next fit. ... Simulations by Bays (1977) show that next first gives slightly worse performance than first fit. ... Another well-known algorithm is best fit. ... Best fit is slower than first fit.... Somewhat surprisingly, it also results in more wasted memory than first fit or next fit because it tends to fill up memory with tiny, useless holes. First fit generates larger holes on the average. ... one could think about worst fit... Simulation has shown that worst first is not a very good idea. ...
> quick fit ... has the same disadvantage as all schemes that sort by hole size, namely, when a process terminates or is swapped out, finding its neighbors to see if a merge is possible is expensive. If merging is not done, memory will quickly fragment into a large number of small, useless holes.
It was challenging in every way imaginable. There was no existing algorithm that could deliver the accuracy and robustness we required. It had to run within the limited power budget of a phone. And it had to be done quickly before the hardware became uncompetitive.
At the time it was given to me it was a rough demo with no clear path forward to shipping. We had no metrics to tell how good it was, how good it had to be, or whether we were even making progress. We had no team of computer vision experts to work on core algorithms. We had no idea if the problem was solvable at any amount of power consumption. There were more than a few people within the company who thought it couldn't be done.
I want to be very clear about credit. I put this as the hardest thing I have ever done but I was only the manager in charge of the project. While I built the team and owned the problem, I did not write the code or design the algorithms. I had incredible people who did outstanding engineering work and researchers who advanced the boundaries of computer vision. It was a privilege to work with them and I am proud of them.
Great article but it misses an essential difference between MySpace and Facebook. Facebook was built for Mark Zuckerberg and MySpace was built for News Corporation. Zuckerberg understood the interests and tastes of his generation. MySpace only understood the interests of their advertisers.
This really brings back memories. 25 years ago I used (what was then) the undocumented variation in the itoa() routine for the Borland C run-time library. The purpose was to eliminate the need for a 16-byte table to generate hex codes when base-16 output was desired. itoa() was a part of the printf() library so this table became embedded in virtually every executable. Knocking that out was a meaningful size optimization in those days.
It will never be outdated thanks to all the happy memories it holds for me. Thanks for writing it, Michael. It's one of a few books I will never part with.
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