This appears to be a fan port with no credit listed for the porting process[1]. It's interesting that it was released 10 days after the old new thing article was written.
One of really cool (personal favorite) games from that era was Hover by Eric Undersander. While not removed, it only runs on Windows with limited resolution options, etc.
I was lucky enough to contact its creator and he agreed to open source it, so I can one day finish a modern cross-platform port that I can enjoy on OS X at 4k resolutions, etc.
Unlike books, games tend to suffer this fate where you can't easily enjoy the classics from many years ago because they run on proprietary/closed source systems and aren't maintained.
Talking about extras on Windows, I warmly remember this one, a song by Weezer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kemivUKb4f4
This video was included on a WIN95 CD with my first computer, along with Hover and a game-like video editor, it's name I cannot recall.
I remember that video and the trailer for "Rob Roy" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0-2kzujLA8 ) being on there and remember watching both with amazement numerous times at how smooth the video was and how many colors it had (coming from the mostly 256-color Windows 3.1/DOS days).
I used to have the disc with hover and weezer song buddy holly. My favorite old windows game tho had to be Rodents Revenge. Between that and snake I could spend hours wasting time.
??? "a game originally created by Eric Undersander in 2000."
That and the pictures on the page you link make me think that is not the same Hover that was included in Windows 95: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hover%21
Windows 8 came across as a kind of entertainment toy device that focused on content consumption and advertisement delivery embedded right in the start menus.
Removing the silly game could be part of Microsoft's agenda to undo the damage that Windows 8 did to its image, and rebrand itself as a "Windows OS is for getting work done" tool, rather than a novelty 'yon dungeon' video game where you try to swipe, swirl, shake, and charm your way through the 7 steps everyone must do to get to the control panel.
That would have been even more work, because there was at the time no infrastructure in Setup for having 32-bit-only components. (And then automatically uninstalling it when WOW64 was disabled.) And besides, all the people who criticized Windows 95 as "not really a 32-bit operating system because it has some parts in 16-bit" would use the same logic to say that 64-bit Windows is "not really a 64-bit operating system."
Thanks, I didn't read the comments. The technical point is probably not the whole truth: Vista 64-bit shipped with a 32-bit Internet Explorer for plugin compatibility. So there must have been some kind of setup infrastructure.
The "besides" point is what I was expecting: there was some kind of rule not to ship 32-bit-only components to claim "full 64-bit support". A rule that was mindlessly applied even to a little game that has nothing to do with the core OS. As I said, politics.
(Not that I personally care, but I've observed that people love those builtin games.)
And I still miss the cat as the "office assistant" (it's much nicer than Clippy). Not to do anything useful, just to react there on the screen while the office work is done. Really.
The pinball game, by the way, is a stripped version of Maxis Full Tilt! Pinball. I had a copy of the game bundled with some other Maxis game.
That said, I had several other pinball games at the time and I thought that Full Tilt! was one of the worst ones, so I don't understand the love that surrounds it.
Anyone here by chance who has contacts at Sierra Entertainment? I'm reverse engineering good old EarthSiege 2 and could use some help from its creators :)
If my memory doesn't trick me, there was a text you could type on word with a certain keyboard shortcut or something like that (sort of konami code) which let you play pinball under the Word program. Any one remember that one ?
Word 97, I remember! :) Excel 97 had a similar thing where you'd fly around in 3d, over generated terrain. I think the pinball game included in Word was extremely basic but it was nice to see the developers got to include them.
Always comment your code. The online post kindly submitted here documents one reason why commenting code is important. (And why structuring the code reasonably around modules that reflect the code's functionality is a good idea.) Yeah, code is only rarely written that way, but the code that is better documented lives longer.
The comments mention the developers wrote it in x86 assembly, but that it was later converted to C automatically, so maybe it lost any comments it had at that point.
Other commenters pointed out it was just a stripped down version of a Maxis game, so maybe the comments were stripped before selling it to Microsoft to make them more likely to hire the source company again for any more work. If the company was selling pin ball games to multiple companies using a shared code base, might make sense.
It was dropped because Microsoft felt it was inappropriate or embarrassing to ship an app that they themselves could not port to 64-bit, at a time when they were asking 3rd party developers to do the same.
Raymond address that in his reply to the first comment on TFA.
"That would have been even more work, because there was at the time no infrastructure in Setup for having 32-bit-only components. (And then automatically uninstalling it when WOW64 was disabled.) ..."
Can anyone confirm if Pinball shipped with XP/Server 2003 x64, and whether it was a 32-bit or 64-bit executable there? (if you have the CD, you should be able to look for PINBALL.EX_ on it and expand it to see if it is 32-bit or 64-bit)
Pinball did an excellent job of showcasing the graphics possibilities of Windows at a time when people expected to fire up MS-DOS for a PC game beyond Solitaire. Although it was instantly playable (and enjoyably so) it did not suffer from being overwhelmingly addictive - work was possible. In some ways the limited life of the game is fine, it did its job and showed that games on Windows could have little touches like hi-res colour graphics.
Currently I have a Windows 8 PC that is there for reading emails. I do all my real work on another box. I have tried to use the Office apps and such like so it is not like I have not tried to use this Windows PC. However, I have no idea what games it comes with. On older Windows such feature would be discovered in seconds even if you had never used a computer before. With the newer Windows 8 there is no such discovery - in fact I only learned how to do power off 'mouse only' without using CTRL+ALT+DEL last week.
Looking back I wish Windows did have pleasant surprises such as the Pinball game rather than be what it has become. Windows isn't really a 'serious' piece of software any more.
I feel the same way, XP was a beast. It got dusty in the room when I played that 'Escape from Windows XP' game. She will be missed. (And still probably used in China for many years to come)
The best part of that post is the comments from (AFACT all of) the original Cinematronics developers. It's a refreshing reminder of the days when programmers couldn't rely on raw hardware speed to make something like this run as smoothly as it did. They routinely had to invent their own clever (or sometimes not-so-clever) performance hacks, and what's really impressive is how well they remembered those hacks even a decade later.
It's a wonderful thing that we now have faster hardware, and better knowledge of how to solve these kinds of problems cleanly, and more available libraries/frameworks to encapsulate that knowledge. Still, hats of to the pioneers who were traveling that territory before the superhighways were built.
Pinball in Windows was just the first table of Maxis Full Tilt Pinball (which was published but not written by Maxis iirc), and was very fun, however, I don't think it was the best Pinball table made. That award I would give to Epic Pinball's Super Android table, which is shareware from the 386 era and runs fine in DosBox.
As I recall when they went from Vista to 7 they removed Inkball and some others as well.
I thought it was some licensing problem because most if not all of the games were licensed from third party companies.
Anyone remember the old Microsoft Windows Entertainment Pack with Tetris and other games? They were all 16 bit and when Windows went to 64 bits they wouldn't work anymore and they didn't convert them to 32 bit, and I think they didn't have the license to Tetris anymore to make a 32 bit version because of some lawsuit that Atari, Nintendo, and others had made illegal copies of it over the licensing rights between the Russian programmer and the company he worked for at the time he wrote Tetris.
70 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadhttp://www.techspot.com/downloads/5697-microsoft-pinball-for...
Works for me on Windows 7.
Hopefully it's clean.
[1]https://web.archive.org/web/20130127144603/http://mspinball....
I was lucky enough to contact its creator and he agreed to open source it, so I can one day finish a modern cross-platform port that I can enjoy on OS X at 4k resolutions, etc.
https://github.com/shurcooL/Hover#hover
Unlike books, games tend to suffer this fate where you can't easily enjoy the classics from many years ago because they run on proprietary/closed source systems and aren't maintained.
However, this one had really fun physics-driven gameplay that made it unlike any other game.
Indeed good times back in 1995, can't believe it's been already 20 years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtoHxMWw354
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIW4F285QjA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyfYP-KrNIM
That and the pictures on the page you link make me think that is not the same Hover that was included in Windows 95: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hover%21
(I think most other posters think you're referring to the Hover! I linked, which, like Pinball in the OP, was included with Windows.)
Removing the silly game could be part of Microsoft's agenda to undo the damage that Windows 8 did to its image, and rebrand itself as a "Windows OS is for getting work done" tool, rather than a novelty 'yon dungeon' video game where you try to swipe, swirl, shake, and charm your way through the 7 steps everyone must do to get to the control panel.
That would have been even more work, because there was at the time no infrastructure in Setup for having 32-bit-only components. (And then automatically uninstalling it when WOW64 was disabled.) And besides, all the people who criticized Windows 95 as "not really a 32-bit operating system because it has some parts in 16-bit" would use the same logic to say that 64-bit Windows is "not really a 64-bit operating system."
The "besides" point is what I was expecting: there was some kind of rule not to ship 32-bit-only components to claim "full 64-bit support". A rule that was mindlessly applied even to a little game that has nothing to do with the core OS. As I said, politics.
(Not that I personally care, but I've observed that people love those builtin games.)
That said, I had several other pinball games at the time and I thought that Full Tilt! was one of the worst ones, so I don't understand the love that surrounds it.
I'm guessing it comes from bored office workers with locked down XP machines.
Other commenters pointed out it was just a stripped down version of a Maxis game, so maybe the comments were stripped before selling it to Microsoft to make them more likely to hire the source company again for any more work. If the company was selling pin ball games to multiple companies using a shared code base, might make sense.
It could have been converted to 64-bit, but they didn't have the time.
"That would have been even more work, because there was at the time no infrastructure in Setup for having 32-bit-only components. (And then automatically uninstalling it when WOW64 was disabled.) ..."
There IS a PINBALL.EX_ on the XP x64 cd, and it expands to a 64-bit executable.
Currently I have a Windows 8 PC that is there for reading emails. I do all my real work on another box. I have tried to use the Office apps and such like so it is not like I have not tried to use this Windows PC. However, I have no idea what games it comes with. On older Windows such feature would be discovered in seconds even if you had never used a computer before. With the newer Windows 8 there is no such discovery - in fact I only learned how to do power off 'mouse only' without using CTRL+ALT+DEL last week.
Looking back I wish Windows did have pleasant surprises such as the Pinball game rather than be what it has become. Windows isn't really a 'serious' piece of software any more.
It's a wonderful thing that we now have faster hardware, and better knowledge of how to solve these kinds of problems cleanly, and more available libraries/frameworks to encapsulate that knowledge. Still, hats of to the pioneers who were traveling that territory before the superhighways were built.
Android wasn't as fun because it scrolled, and you couldn't see anything except a tiny slice where the ball was.
I thought it was some licensing problem because most if not all of the games were licensed from third party companies.
Anyone remember the old Microsoft Windows Entertainment Pack with Tetris and other games? They were all 16 bit and when Windows went to 64 bits they wouldn't work anymore and they didn't convert them to 32 bit, and I think they didn't have the license to Tetris anymore to make a 32 bit version because of some lawsuit that Atari, Nintendo, and others had made illegal copies of it over the licensing rights between the Russian programmer and the company he worked for at the time he wrote Tetris.