i was curious about that because i watched daves video a couple days or so. glad you had the quote also and appreciate so much your dive. like and appreciate dave too. my fellow 'nerds' :D

What video are you guys talking about? Has it been removed?

@@iivarimokelainen Dave's Garage removed his video on Pinball, thank you for reminding me to update the Pinned Post (this video had a differe description and title before hand)

@@NCommander why?

@@iivarimokelainen I have no idea. His video basically the same topic as this one, but just ended with "no 64-bit versions", then a section on how you can install it on 32-bit systems. I really don't know why he yanked it though. I tried to reach out went up and later.; no response.

Very cool; one thing you might be able to answer for me, was Microsoft given the code to the final release of Full Tilt Pinball? From what I saw looking at the Pinball beta builds, it *looks* like it was a late beta build; multiball is missing from the NT version, but there is some code hooks relating to it. Also, I wish I was good enough to get Maelstrom unlocked.

Full Tilt shipped some time later so I would expect there would be a time gap of some minor changes and bug fixes between the Microsoft and Maxis versions. It was long ago and the details aren't clear in my memory. If Mike Sandige or Kevin Gliner (my partners at Cinematronics) see this, they may be able to share more information.

There's a short answer and a long answer to your question. Or maybe an off-the-cuff answer and a more accurate answer. Keep in mind I haven't had a chance to watch the video (although I definitely will when I get a chance, now that I'm aware of it). So the off-the-cuff answer is: Microsoft almost certainly had a copy of the full source to 3D Pinball, and not a beta version. What a lot of folks don't realize is that we didn't start building Full Tilt until 3D Pinball (Space Cadet) was within weeks of gold master as part of the Plus Pack. Possibly days: the deadline to include the Maxis name and phone number in the product, after which no further changes would be allowed by Microsoft, drove the pace we closed the Maxis publishing deal to build a 3 table commercial product (which later came to be called Full Tilt). Microsoft had various rights to maintain the product and ship it with future operating systems, and among those were maintenance rights. We were required to deliver code updates if we made any and they cared enough to have them. I don't remember if they ever asked or if we ever provided any. Nevertheless, it's highly unlikely though they (or any publisher from that era) would have allowed a product to ship on hundreds of millions of machines without the ability to fix it themselves in case the original developer was unable to. There's also zero chance they would have allowed a beta of pinball into the Plus Pack. There were some bugs that made it through, of course. We fixed those for the Full Tilt version of Space Cadet that shipped 5 months later. And added a couple features we didn't finish in time for the Plus Pack (multi-ball, for example). I came across the Chen thread long after it was dormant, which is unfortunate. I seem to recall one of his examples of bad pinball code was his inability to track down the collision source. However, I still have the source to Full Tilt and by extension, Space Cadet. Other than a couple bug fixes and minor features, the Space Cadet source should be identical to what we shipped in the Plus Pack. Last time this came up, it took me all of 30 seconds to find "collision.cpp". I'll separately add that Mike Sandige, who led the engineering effort on pinball, is a fantastic engineer - it would have been out of character for him to write anything obtuse. So Chen was probably working from code that was a few steps removed from whatever we delivered to Microsoft. I have two possible theories on why that was the case: 1) Pinball was a 16-bit product. A few years after it shipped an engineer at Microsoft (David Plummer) was tasked with porting it to 32-bit systems so it could run on NT, Win2k, etc. Depending on how limited Plummer's time was or whatever ideas he had about re-writing the code, I'd speculate that Chen was looking at Plummer's port code, or Plummer's port code plus any number of other engineers in between him and when Chen got to it. I don't want to make it sound like Plummer wrote bad code - sometimes the goal is just to get something working and legibility isn't a priority. It's also possible Plummer wasn't working directly from the C++ source to begin with. 2) In order to put the cheat codes in that Microsoft wouldn't allow, we had to obfuscate them pretty heavily. I don't know what Mike did to make that happen, but perhaps it required making otherwise legible code less coherent. Although I doubt he would have made the code so hard to understand that critical areas like the collision algorithm would be hard to locate. And someone did eventually find the cheat codes years later and strip them out (at least the ones that generated our individual game credits and those random quotes). So maybe there's yet another engineer between Plummer and Chen who tackled the project. That's the short answer, eh. I still have the source for Full Tilt somewhere, and the old contract with Microsoft (detailing their specific rights re: source), and a ton of email from that era between our company and Microsoft. I could probably tease out a more accurate answer for you once I have a chance to look at some of that (well, maybe not the email).

​@@NCommander Nice work with this video! I also don't know exactly why it was removed, but I tend to agree with your conclusion. I was lead programmer for Space Cadet and Full Tilt. No, we didn't provide Microsoft with Full Tilt Pinball sources or assets. I'm pretty sure I would have been the one to prepare such a delivery, and don't remember doing so.

Hey, following up, since I saw the comments left by @Kevin Gliner, and @Mike Sandige, and damn, I didn't think the original authors would see this and I'm like wow. I actually was somewhat skeptical of the claim after I started investigating this since honestly, I found the collision detection code staring at a disassembly, but I also have no reason to dispute Raymond's account; as I said in the video, I just thought there was more to the story. I don't know if there's any way you can me to investigate the original source, although I suspect there is a rights nightmare there, I'd be willing to do a follow-up to this video, digging into the Full Tilt Collection, and a few details that have since come to light. Feel free to reach out to me via email (its on my profile, or michael -at- casadevall dot pro). I actually spent some time looking at the DEC Alpha build which appears to use 32-bit precision, so it's interesting to see what does and does work. From what I can tell, NT was ported sometime before NT 4's final release, and that port was put in the Plus! Place. It will actually run on NT 3.51 "as is", but it lags, as that version of Windows has very slow GDI as compared to both NT 4 and Windows 95. From there, it was ported to Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC, with all those ports working. There was then the Alpha64 port which was never released, and I suspect this was when Pinball broke with the crash bug we saw on XP RTM, which I suspect is a pointer sizing issue in the edge detector. This then got ported to IA64, axed, and well, everything else as I presented it. I found out that someone actually did a full decompile of Space Cadet Pinball from the XP 32-bit version, and he couldn't find any collision issues on 64-bit, but I haven't look in-depth to see what exactly is going on there, but it does suggest that there was more to this story than not.

just wait tilll windows 40 has ruminants of candy crush but cannot be played and we see tutorials about it

@@pnksounds I hope nobody likes windows candy crush enough to do that….

@@mikep5854 fr 💀

@@pnksounds windows candy crush ??????!!!!!!!!! So it means that every windows user has turned into a mom 🤯😱😂

@@mikep5854 Trust me, those people will come. Maybe not today, maybe not for five years. But they will eventually come. Until then, we must prepare ourselves.

Sucks that it took SGI down with it.

How did it go?!

@@crkvend It was awkward because she did already know this story of pinball.exe and the 32bit and 64bit problem, and I had nothing else to say.

@@cinquecento1985 :D

Anyone watching this video is not going on any date.

@@bjejoh the truth hurts

I would go along with that.

I used to play with that game back in the day. I fully agree that they should've upgraded and kept it on Windows 10.

It was a hell of a game. Loved pinball as a kid. I played so much kirbys pinball land on gameboy

Maxis is the same publisher that made Sim City, right? I doubt MS would be willing to keep paying royalties or Maxis did not want any competition for their game published by them directly (the 3D pinball already mentioned). It would have been nice if Maxis was able to include a native version of Windows pinball in 3D pinball but maybe it is better it is abandonware now.

Best software microsoft ever created. edit: not developed by Microsoft, go figure

I know I'd have sent it, though sadly it would probably have been caught by an AI script that deletes anything no longer supported.

Really a bummer to get this type of an error - with SIGNED CODE. But it just goes into a bit bucket, lost forever, because they only look at the bugs that produce the most number of crashes, say like Fords Pinto division. Its not like Nightly, where you can report a bug, and have it fix the very next day, ( which has happened to me 3 times). However, if millions of people had crashes like this, then Microsoft would roll over from its ...

@@TheAnon03 doesn't have to be "AI" just a script that ignores stuff

@@_GhostMiner Sometimes the correct terminology just doesn't come to your head and you've got to go with what you've got.

@@TheAnon03 it's not about terminology, you said they might use a script, but not an AI for such basic task

Having actually had to do that for real. trust me, its a hell you don't wish to inflict on others.

Visual Studio crashed for me the other day, and I got a debug dialog asking if I wanted to attach the Visual Studio debugger to the crashed process. Hahaha

You were supposed to destroy them, not join them!

so THAT'S why this video was recommended to me right after watching ones on Skyrim

Everyone who is a long time user of Windows knows the paid of task manager not responding

Try 3-D Ultra Pinball. Though I have nostalgia glasses for it too.

Pinball fantasies and Microsoft pinball arcade were quite decent. Bally/Amtex 8Ball deluxe was good for low spec dos PC's (286 and up).

Epic Pinball?

Try Full Tilt! Pinball. It’s basically the full version of 3D Pinball Space Cadet but also with more skins

Ah yes had to kill time before smartphones.

Yes if they didn’t remove it I would of known of it earlier

@@TheCaptainSplatter this was in the early 2010s

Wow bro, what are the chances of me seeing you here hahaha

I mean, hey, we got Purble Place

You remind me of myself: sinking tons of time into something extremely obscure and niche for way too long. Glad to see I'm not alone.

@@Bug_Bait lol same here :) gotta find something to distract myself from the encroaching oblivion that is death haha

I tried to get a working version of this on fancade but I didn't really know the code part so it's just lying there now

One month of solid research, reverse engineering and move for a 30 minute. Someone has lost its mind, and it's probably me :)

@@NCommander full tilt

@@NCommander Just to deepen the rabbit hole, now I'm wondering if it was ever around for Alpha processors. BTW, Intel i860 predates IA64 quite a bit and also was called 64 bit (though I'd say it's fair to call it a 32 bit processor, much like a 386 isn't an 80 bit processor even though its FPU uses that width - turns out i860 has a 64-bit external bus, much like Pentium, but 32-bit integer registers), but it was not used as a PC CPU. Wikipedia indicates Windows NT (prior to gaining that name) started out on i860XR workstations.

@@0LoneTech So, I actually ended up spending a bunch looking at the alpha version over Discord as an impromptu stream: Windows NT on Alpha treats it as a 32-bit platform (pointers are 32-bit), although there are a few ways to get above the 4 GiB limit, no process can use more than 4 GiB of memory. Pinball itself appears to use 32-bit floating point operations on DEC Alpha, and works fine, although I'm not very good with Alpha assembly, and the tools I had were even worse than Itanium. I don't know enough about i860 to comment if it's really a 64-bit architecture; people say 80286 was a 32-bit architecture, but its realistically a 24-bit one, so all things differ.

@@NCommander If we're rating them by address space then 8086 is 20 bit, Pentium Pro 36 bit, and various amd64 models 48 to 52 bit. It gets weird.

I actually did watch your video on Full Tilt Pinball ages ago, but I forgot most of the details between then and now. I had intended to go more in detail about that aspect of Pinball's history (you can infact find a lot of stuff from Full Tilt in the disassembly; i.e., pinball.exe tries to see if there's other tables to load, and there are remanants of a table select screen and more. There's even a few bits of code left from multiball, which was removed from the Windows version), but time I went that far in, well, the video was already 25 minutes in length, and grew a bit longer as I edit it, so yeah ...

I didn't know about raymond chens post or any of this until way later. However I was really into trying new versions of windows and doing all sorts of crazy things back in the day when I had more time and multiple computers. I ran windows xp 64 bit for close to two years as my main OS on my main computer. I wanted to test out the power of my new athlon 64. It was underwhelming as I knew it would be and most of my software was 32 bit still. I made sure to run half life 2 64 bit. Basically I didn't notice much difference, except having to copy some dll's over from 32 bit windows xp to make things like bink video work, which I had to do in server 2003. I ran any and all systems, even ran windows server 2003 and all the longhorn builds. Now I can just have a stable system and vmware to test things, or use an old laptop. Anyway. I recall running windows 64 bit and playing pinball on it. I had no idea what code base it was, I just remember finding it odd seeing a 64 bit edition was never ported later on, but vividly remember playing a lot of pinball back in the day.

9 months seems like plenty of time to develop a simple game. I know developing things back then wasn't as easy as now, but even so, it would be feasible to rush in 1-2 months, for a single coder, and single artist. 9 months would be easy mode. You have small individuals, or small teams whipping out decent games for gamejams these days in 24-72 hours. Given lesser tools available at the time, 9 months should still be plenty.

The “too long dont read” is longer than the actual content

He sounds a bit like you actually

But doing this you couldn’t still accomplish tasks and get promoted and stuff though…that was half the fun

Sending some love your way. My grandfather died earlier this year. I feel that man. Yo take care.

💝💝

He def sees this message. All dead read KZfaq comments.

@@Mark-zi6nt , , and the Living Dead too , apparently ⚰️ R I P

I agree strongly with what you said. The deep dives you can take are so unique.

it was only a Demo, Fury3D too DX needed to be promoted on Windows! This channel,mad people only here! stupid levels!

Same here! I used to play alot of If have nothing else to do at home. Just some random windows game like solitaire because my older bought a PC for himself, eventually I started playing around.

Was playing t4c and myst and the sims later on. P4 bb here.

How sad. In 1964 I only had an 8k EMIDEC computer that only ran an entire plastics manufacturing facility, including process modeling, payroll for over 7000 people and managed our entire physical inventory. And it didn't even have a disk drive. Just four 35mm tape drives and an 8k drum for transient memory as the 1k Williams tube memory refresh rate was a bit slow. But even then we could play OXO on the little dot matrix CRT screens, compose music and print graphics on the line printers using overprinting and paper advance instructions. You have no idea what 'old' computers can do. It's all the graphics that suck up the processing capacity these days. Oh, and I've been playing Space Cadet pinball on Win10 64 since I first installed it, I just keep running the Win7 version and it works fine. The speed it performs at is subject to processor speed in that sometimes it defies the laws of physics with the ball speed but just running a few videos in background gets it back down to human playing speed. It would be nice if there were additional board configurations to play on after all these years.

@@philipgrice1026 ok boomer

Manifest is easy comparing to Windbg which sucks 1000x more...

Wow I feel old. My primary school games were Oregon Trail and Math Munchers.

Pinball highscores were everything

@@jordanwhite352 Those were the days lol. Also Carmen Sandiego games.

@@jordanwhite352 and odell down under

skifree and missle command

The original intent was to use Kerbal Space Program (Danny2462 has a video showing the solar system falling apart with distance which is the same type of bug), but it turns out I needed to use a Win32 build on Windows to make it happen (the Linux version has higher precision), and well, Minecraft is less seizure inducing.

Minecraft is also a Microsoft product - I mean: as Microsoft as Pinball, so very well fitting.

@@sarowie Yeah, but not back then. Mojang were the sole developers back when the beta hadn't implemented double precision floats.

Agreed, made it way easier for non-techos.

It sure is. I watched a video of someone playing an early build of No Man's Sky and he decided to fly straight at the sun. But the further he flew from the planet, the more glitchy it got until it eventually crashed. Probably due to floating point issues.

I don't know why Microsoft wont revamp Pinball then. They revamped Solitaire and other card games too.

@@ryuno2097 likely the old spaghetti code is a pain to work on, so they gave up.

@@ryuno2097 the assets for those are relatively easy to replace, compared to pinball that has a lot more assets. Also the original devs were pretty much gone by 1997, and Maxis was bought by EA and focused on Sims. I would guess liscencing issues for a remake would have been a problem as well. Possible but not worth the effort.

It definitely makes sense. Still, I wish they'd have just kept it as a hidden Easter egg or something, since they had a working version of it.

@@mista414 agreed. They could have just labeled it "classic" to help explain why ugly ancient space cadet pinball is still on the shiny new OS of the future. Hell they could have wrapped a fancy shell GUI on it or something.

Yea man it was addictive as hell!

@@meganwyatt1607 yep! haha

same, my grandpa had a windows 98 laptop and I played this for hours

Sitting here in 2021, watching YT, and playing Space Cadet Pinball on my Windows XP Media Edition. Been promising myself a new computer for the last ten years or so, s'pect I'll get around to it sooner or later.

I still remember the code to control the pinball with the mouse

I actually left a lot out, relating to its inclusion in early Windows, and its Full Tilt Pinball incarnation, but I'm really trying to avoid an hour long video ...

First time I saw it was some late betas (they might have been release candidates) that included it as part of the walkthrough to demonstrate how significantly faster 4.0' GDI was compared to 3.51. One of the big changes was moving it to kernel space which made pinball seamless, while it was a slide show on 3.51. The other plus was it rendered print jobs in kernel space speeding up printing. Howei thought that was stupid as I didn't play games on the servers (that is what Workstation is for!) and as much as I feared it meant fonts with scaling errors would now bluescreen the servers instead of just crashing the print que. From what I recall it was a built in font at 2 pts that'd do the job. Not happy about that, we had to set the time a week into the future for it to expire out the job. Obviously this causes issues with Domain Controllers...

@@NCommander On a side note when I noticed that my home computer (which was running vista) didn't have pinball I went to school the next day and copied the game files off their windows xp 2005 pc's onto my thumb drive. And last year I bought full tilt pinball from GOG so I now have 2 working versions of the game. It's been pretty neat comparing the two. Edit: nevermind I'm going crazy I guess, I found an old copy of the full tilt pinball cd that I had purchased back in 2002-2003 ish and installed it. I did purchase some old pinball games off of GOG though.

@@NCommander please do hour long videos! Your explanation is sooo good and detailed, i love it. Also, we all nerds here :)

Well, I tried very hard to rule out that possibility, but well, that's what I came to the conclusion to in the end. Could be other reasons, but I really don't think it wa sa technical basis.

Sneaking down to the garage to play on the family computer when you should have been in bed... ...bbrrRRRRRWWUUUUUUUU

Almost like adding 1 to infinity.

Definitely. The game certainly harbors tons of nostalgia; it's unclear (at the time) departure only amplified renewed interest. I was quite impressed by such a clean, facile demonstration over what is overwhelming for enthusiasts all the way up to software engineers.

and this is the reason we're dropping in a few hours vs Monday which was the original plan.

I copied the game on a 500 Mb USB stick when i was 5 and now I can play it on Windows 10 lol

Feels bad man.

Uhm, the ball is supposed to be solid steel (hence the shiny look of the ball), doesn't quite make sense why it would deform visually (in reality, it does deform and return back to normal state, but it's not a visible deformation, because steel is a hard solid material). So even if the collision would be detected, it wouldn't cause the ball change its shape due to deformation. It might be likely the ball was partially hidden behind the paddle (or was supposed to be partially hidden behind the paddle) so the game changed the shape.

@@CZghost Agreed on all counts. It could just be a creative liberty, or a way to prevent the ball from overlapping the paddle layer in a early build. In videogames and movies, reality isn't always what is most entertaining.

That deaf, dumb and blind kid can sure play a mean pinball

I actually didn't know this, but in hindsight, it makes perfect sense. I guess the real story is that Aero on itanium would have been pretty bad :) At least on my zx6000 (although I'm told the iLO VGA which is much more standardized, is even worse in terms of performance)

I want to say Panther was the codename for Windows PE as a whole. I may dig into it, but I more called that out on how bad Aero looked in that color mode. Most IA64 servers, if they had VGA at all, had iLO VGA which was not exactly impressive.

Echoing/agreeing with everything here, you can't move the setup dialog window. The close button also looks... off. Always has. I kinda find it cynically amusing nobody ever fixed it. ("Oh it'll only be seen at setup time," they probably said... while the OS X installer was playing music from across the room...)

@@asmqb7222 It's a stripped down copy of windows, running a full screen app. Why would you want to drag the window anywhere...

@@lillywho Indeed so, and the whole package does the job it needs to do. But since my brain OCDs about details, I do eyetwitch a bit that 9x, 2K and XP all had draggable windows, while Vista didn't. But this reflection also sort of tells me that the revamp process was so disorganized, ad-hoc and scrambled that they had to resort to this sort of thing in order to "get setup done" and move onto the next thing. Which only gives me more respect for the RelEng gold-master process, I guess.

Die and not even releasing the source!

I think it'd be a worthy project for any game modder with reverse engineering chops :D

Fun fact - Full Tilt Pinball runs at 1024x768

Here is a portable version made from a disassembly. The assets must be somewhere embedded there. No idea where.

It's on the list, but my power bill needs a rest first :)

I just hope it is a decently researched video then - cause there is a lot of misinformation, like claiming the architecture or the products were bad and didn't perform well. (Heck, there is a reason why it was supported for so long despite not being good with the large x86 codebase).

The company i worked for back them bought 10 of thousands of them... I guess they was one major custermer

Well, Merced (IA64v1) was rubbish. It's dreadfully slow due to far too little L2/L3 cache, and honestly, McKinley was being outpaced by the Pentium 3/4s of the era. IA64 was mostly supported because HP chose that hill to die on, but by 2004, it was pretty clear that it was a dead end in processor evolution.

That's a month of my life that seems to be well rewarded.

Purble Place?

That was in fact intentional word play :)

I can’t wait to see the video on Itanium!

I think Raymond makes it clear in his post that it was not a licensing issue, and the fact that several builds exist would indicate so too

Yet, coming home from school in the late 90s, I was 1000% more excited to play Pinball than Minesweeper.

So your ‘logic’ comes from…what? Lmao gtfo

@@namedrop721 It was mentioned at the end I believe. The new vista desktop "Aro" theme (since this really happened during longhorn to vista transition) did not play nice with the older image resolution the game would have looked very bad if they updated it to fit the modern OS. That challenge also coupled with image licensing (maybe some other licensing aspects unaware to the general public) made it very much impossible for them to put it in the new releases due to terrible UI. Minesweeper, MS solitaire was licensed by Microsoft so thats easy for them to change the graphics to the new look. You can see it in the end of the video as well.

@Zaydan Naufal yeah must have left e that out. thanks for the correction! :D

Probably >.>;, although I'm amazed this video stayed up as long as it has without this being noted.

The original title of this video was "The REAL Story on Why Space Cadet Pinball Was Removed (ft. Windows on Itanium)", but Dave's Garage (which is a 151k sub channel) dropped a video on Pinball, and I rushed this one out the door to prevent being overshadowed, and made it clear that ther was more to this.

The appeal was (I suppose) experienced by a generation of people who grew up visiting bowling alleys or bars that featured actual physical pinball machines. As one of those people, I can tell you that I found the computer versions wanting when compared to the real thing.

AXP was a 64-bit platform, but NT ran in a 32-bit operating mode and address space. The problem was more related to the FPU as far as I can tell; I don't have an AXP system so I can't easily examine how it does floating point numbers though ...

@@NCommander If my Multia wasn't acting up again now (even after thermal paste, the heat death chip, and recapping) I'd look into this myself to see

Well got that working... now I guess I have no excuses, time to load it into visual studio or windebug

@@ChartreuseKitsune I can't remember if symbols are located on the NT4 CD, but they are on the CD versions of the Service Packs (I know I found pinball.dbg on one of them). They're not PDB based, so good luck :)

Microsoft with endless programmers and intimate knowledge of their code: This is an impossible task! Some 16 year-old with Python: I can make that in a weekend if you give me the graphical assets...

mad people only here, just a DX promo demo, bought to promote DX in windows! why the mad freaks here?

Omg Hover got pretty rage-inducing but I was obsessed with it lol

I love hover. Did u have digdug centipede and battlezone too. I did have Windows me as well. The cadet game was there from the beginning but most later versions Vista xp and other versions got rid of the cadet pinball and other games.