WHY SPACE CADET PINBALL WAS REMOVED FROM WINDOWS
If you remember Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows XP then you will without a doubt remember this nostalgic Pinball game that came as standard on those versions of Microsoft Windows, but then with the release of Microsoft Vista in 2006, it was gone forever. But what exactly were the reasons for Microsoft removing it and not updating it to be compatible with a 64-bit operating system or just making a new version of it?
According to the Space Cadet Pinball developer, this is what he had to say about the game:
"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."
- Source: devblogs.microsoft.com
But were there other reasons as to why this game faded away? Have a look at the video below:
Take a look at the video below by the YouTube channel: NCommander on The Real Story On Why Space Cadet Pinball Was Removed (Ft. Windows On Itanium)...