
Why was Pinball removed from Windows Vista? (2012) - pzaich
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/12/18/10378851.aspx
======
shurcooL
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.

[https://github.com/shurcooL/Hover#hover](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.

~~~
kaivi
Talking about extras on Windows, I warmly remember this one, a song by Weezer:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kemivUKb4f4](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.

~~~
a3_nm
I still remember fondly the MID files that shipped with Windows 95:
PASSPORT.MID, CANYON.MID, and the easter egg CLOUDS.MID.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtoHxMWw354](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtoHxMWw354)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIW4F285QjA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIW4F285QjA)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyfYP-
KrNIM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyfYP-KrNIM)

~~~
visakanv
Oh my god, that first track brings memories flooding back. I was a kid! I
wonder how many other such things there are out there like this?

------
notacoward
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.

~~~
gus_massa
The direct link to the first comment of the developer is
[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/12/18/10378...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/12/18/10378851.aspx#10379160)

------
Theodores
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.

~~~
cmdrfred
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)

------
DiabloD3
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.

~~~
Titanbase
Pinball was more popular with everyone I knew because you could see the whole
table. It was fantastic on my friend's giant 21" CRT!

Android wasn't as fun because it scrolled, and you couldn't see anything
except a tiny slice where the ball was.

------
TD-Linux
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.

~~~
trentmb
> so I don't understand the love that surrounds it.

I'm guessing it comes from bored office workers with locked down XP machines.

------
thisjepisje
You can download it here:

[http://www.techspot.com/downloads/5697-microsoft-pinball-
for...](http://www.techspot.com/downloads/5697-microsoft-pinball-for-windows-
vista-7.html)

Works for me on Windows 7.

~~~
yincrash
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.

Hopefully it's clean.

[1][https://web.archive.org/web/20130127144603/http://mspinball....](https://web.archive.org/web/20130127144603/http://mspinball.weebly.com/index.html)

------
biot
There are some great comments from the last time this was submitted:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4938348](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4938348)

------
mmaunder
Code needs constant loving eyes on it or rigor mortis sets in and it's almost
impossible to revive.

------
orionblastar
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.

------
yuhong
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)

~~~
mappu
Mon dieu!

There IS a PINBALL.EX_ on the XP x64 cd, and it expands to a 64-bit
executable.

------
hrbrtglm
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 ?

~~~
cyphax
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.

------
mschuster91
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 :)

------
tokenadult
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.

~~~
lnanek2
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.

------
JelteF
Maybe add 2012 to the title?

------
kazinator
If you want to play a great, classic pinball game, install an Apple II
emulator and look for a disk image of Night Mission Pinball.

------
phpnode
Most of the comments on that article are really depressing, ill considered
mumblings from armchair programmers.

------
nileshtrivedi
All they needed to write is a collision detector detector!

------
isaacdl
I volunteer to invest the time to port it :).

------
codeflo
And presumably, they couldn't just ship the (still working) 32-bit executable
because... politics.

~~~
omh
From a comment on that blog:

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."

~~~
codeflo
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.)

~~~
acqq
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.

------
timmaah
So Microsoft openly admits they shipped code with their operating system that
they did not review or even understand what it contained.

~~~
gaius
I'll wager you're one of these guys who uses a "framework" for your website
without batting an eyelid, or reading every line of code...

------
wizardhat
Well that's just sad. Pinball was dropped because of incompetent programmers.
Don't 32-bit binaries work on 64-bit anyways?

~~~
extempore
The offhand dismissal of Raymond Chen as an "incompetent programmer" captures
the hacker news zeitgeist.

~~~
mikeash
I agree with your sentiment, but I don't think he's pointing the finger at
Chen.

------
sentientmachine
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.

~~~
fakeanon
It was removed before Windows 8.

