Notes on the untimely demise of 3D Pinball for Windows Veteran Microsoft developer Raymond Chen has revealed a bit more about what went wrong with the 64-bit version of Space Cadet Pinball. Space Cadet Pinball was a port of an old Maxis Software game that turned up in the Windows 95 Plus! pack. The Space Cadet table was ported by Dave Plummer (as part of a team working on bringing …
I'm hazy on dates, but much of Microsoft's descent into moral ambiguity, crap software and aggressive design changes seems to have its roots in the moment when they realised that the internet was going to be a big part of the future ( or indeed was already) and that they'd totally missed it. The sense of panic knowing that they were on the verge of irrelevance is still, I'd guess, a big part of their decision making
In about 97 or so, as part of a service request, I received a patch for an Oracle middle ware product on a CD-ROM. In addition to the patch, the CD had a directory called "sparky". So I check what was in that directory - and it had a complete enterprise edition of MS Office 95 - no license key required. Served my office needs for years.
"When you see it next to Windows 11 it's pretty jarring."
My take: "You fool, why did you update to Windows 11?"
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BTW: I have a copy of Pinball I've moved from machine to machine. Because Windows 11, I'll have to give it up. Not because it won't run under Windows 11, but because I won't run under Windows 11.
I always figured that the short list of recent hardware for Windows 11 was due to how long Windows 10 has been around since mid-2015, and will be supported until 2025. Windows 11, released in late 2021, would likely be supported until 2031. (Just in time to handily miss the 2038 date problem.)
I suspect they don't want to support 2010 hardware until 2031. Cant say I blame them; most OS vendors do similar things, just not as poorly.
"they" (Micros~1) wanted everything that was even REMOTELY a game to become adware or premium-ware available ONLY through "The Store", like they did with solitaire games, but "Modern": UI performed like CRAP - and so they DROPPED it because it actually LOOKS BAD UNDER UWP/TIFKAM.
Anyone else have a better explanation?
Oh my God!
I agree. Is it me?
My assumption has been for a while that MS want everything to arrive through the "Store". That they envy Google's control of phone apps and Apple's of their phone/tablet apps. With the cash flow and ad harvesting they can accrue.
And that is about the only thing that they do that seems to have any logic ( however malign) to it.
The rest, stupid design changes that worsen user's experience etc. is probably just internal politics and empire building --is my guess.
It's more likely that Microsoft's cunning plan would be to force install it into every copy of Windows 10 & 11, particularly the "professional" and "workstation" versions (which naturally need games), with administrators forced to "opt out" of this through obscure PowerShell commands that previously stopped working due to other Windows Updates, requiring that an administrator spend countless hours working around Microsoft's instructions on how to use Microsoft's commands in yet another custom Microsoft PowerShell library. Ideally the PowerShell commands will be as badly written as possible to ensure that scripting them is near impossible and the PowerShell library will feel like abandonware as soon as Microsoft coughed it out.
In parallel Microsoft would promote it mercilessly within Windows itself, because that's what the OS is there for. The game will be free at first and then switched to a monthly subscription mode afterwards, linked to Microsoft 365 accounts. The activation of this subscription will be at the end user's discretion and not any administrators and to prevent end users subscribing to this "service", administrators will have to "opt out" of this through obscure PowerShell commands that previously stopped working due to other Windows Updates, requiring that an administrator spend countless hours working around Microsoft's instructions on how to use Microsoft's commands in yet another custom Microsoft PowerShell library. The subscription will be something entirely "reasonable" like £2.99 per user per month.
In my opinion, there is no computer version that is even in the same ballpark as a real physical machine (see what I did there?)
It's the combination of sound, light and feeling that's the real deal - and that excludes the pseudo electronic ones. No, I want solenoids, relays and the active buffers that spark when the ball hits them making the circuit so they clamp and send the ball off at high speed in a totally unpredictable way.
In the mid 1960s I was part-time servicing them for a firm that rented them out to pubs etc. There were 3 or 4 of us youngsters (paid peanuts) and we just had a great time.
P.S.
They had three 'tilt' detectors. Two at 90 degrees that were small weights on sideways springs detecting thumps, and a vertical rod in a hole that detected lifting or rocking. We could test these but weren't able to set them - they had to be done in-situ.
And that's all fine, but nowadays no one wants to pay, even peanuts, for the loving care and frequent intervention those machines need.
I remember Space Cadet from W95, I spent probably too much time on it. It was a fun game. Obviously not like the real thing, but it did a decent job of simulating the random violence of bumpers.
It even had tilt detectors - I forget the details, but there was a button assigned to something like "nudge", and if you pressed it for more than about a quarter of a second you got a tilt.
Anyone with any sense installs Windows 10 (Home/Pro) offline, with networking disconnected. Then the very first thing to do is go to Personalization and turn off "show suggestions on Start Menu". Sounds so helpful and fluffy, doesn't it. Suggestions. Aaaw, how thoughtful. What they mean is "relentlessly auto-install shovelware crap that I neither asked for nor want", but I'm assuming that string was too long for the available space.
If Microsoft don't want it any more, then release its source code and let the community decide what to do with it.
Oh, and use the same approach for anything else that falls into the AbandonWare category on Windows.
We promise not to critique your code, but we might choose to fix things we don't like.
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