alt Hacker NewsSpace Cadet Pinball on Linux
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Cool! I checked out the GitHub:
https://github.com/k4zmu2a/SpaceCadetPinball
It's been ported to a whole bunch of consoles. There's also a browser version!
Also, turns out Space Cadet Pinball is part of a bigger Maxis game I never heard of: Full Tilt! Pinball.
Also turns out we almost got DOOM bundled with Window 95! (GLUEM) but it was rejected: "Can't we just get a game of pinball or something like that?" And here we are :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_Tilt!_Pinball#Development
Last year we shipped a pinball game at Shopify that took some inspiration from Space Cadet. You can still play it here: https://bfcm.shopify.com/
Every year we ship a live visualization of our merchant's sales on Black Friday. For a long time it was just a globe with arcs where each arc shows a real sale going from seller to buyer, but in the last few years we have been transforming the website into something more fun and interactive.
I found programming a pinball machine to be quite challenging. We were a team of 2 engineers and 1 artist and we worked on that project for about a month and a half. We wrote some notes on the process and put them in the desktop computer next to the pinball machine if anyone is curious about how things work.
I like the idea mentioned of a source code escrow, and it feels like that would be a great place for national governments to step in. It reminds me of how the British Library requires that any published book have a copy sent to them for archival. Why not have similar laws in place for source code? If for no other reason than pure archival.
I wouldn't mind at all if it was all just purely kept in a metaphorical locked vault, only to be opened after some special conditions regarding the support and lifespan of the software were met. Even if those terms were like, "only after the original copyright has expired", aka 70+ years, it would still be so much better for the state of preservation of source code over the current norms. We have games that have had their original source code lost in under a decade from their publication. (Kingdom Hearts 1) Any alternative is better than the current state of things.
I like the authors remark on "source code FLOSS escrow" at the bottom of the article.
It's prolly hard to achieve legally, but the idea that a software is close source until it's no longer sold then automatically becomes open source would attract me as a potential user/buyer of the software: less lock-in in the worst-case scenario (being fully dependent on it wile company goes bust or decides to cancel the project).
Reminds me a bit of the https://kde.org/community/whatiskde/kdefreeqtfoundation/
<<The "social contract" ensuring Qt remains open-source is primarily maintained through the KDE Free Qt Foundation, established in 1998. This agreement guarantees that if The Qt Company ever fails to release an open-source version, or if the Qt project is neglected, the foundation has the right to release Qt under a BSD-style license.>>
The Full Tilt version also has multiball which is missing from the Windows version. Lock a ball by shooting into a wormhole where the two lights are the same color, lock 3 balls to start.
If you enjoy playing Space Cadet I would really recommend giving Visual Pinball a try. There are so many more pinball games better than Space Cadet, with amazing tables people have made for them all available for free. I think it's Windows only though (very, tables are all scripted in VBScript and PinMAME is loaded as a COM object).
As an aside I tried to hack around with this and found out the programming for Space Cadet is pretty awful (not to disparage them or anything, it works). The state of the lights directly reflects the game state. (This is the cause of the bug where if you drain or start a mission while the rank-up light show is playing, you can skip a rank.)
Sooner or later I'll split the game from data so the second part will be easier, allowing custom flatpaks to extend data. The flatpak has received updates especially for keeping an up-to-date runtime but the upstream game, however, has not and Flathub will only show appstream data for the update. You can see on the flatpak manifest repo that latest commit is 6 months old: https://github.com/flathub/com.github.k4zmu2a.spacecadetpinb...
I wish somebody had as a passion project or company to build Space Cadet into a real physical pinball table.
I was wondering why newer OS doesn't bundle games with their default installation anymore? Even on smartphone. I remember on old dumb phone (nokia I think), you can play snake and some racing game. It even has multiplayer via bluetooth.
That reminds me, do skilled players actually use the tilt keys? I remember being confused for years as to the purpose of tilt keys because I hadn't used a real pinball machine, and I can't remember it nudging the ball enough to merit the risk.
It is also available as a snap:
I'm always surprised at the nostalgia for Space Cadet Pinball.
Perhaps it was just chance that I grew up playing what seemed like a much better pinball game ( Hyper-3D Pinball, aka Tilt!* ), but I was always underwhelmed by Space Cadet Pinball on windows.
In reality they're both pretty similar, I just happened to play a lot of one before the other, but the full screen DOS experience was much richer than what felt like a much more flat and less 3D windows experience.
You can see some Hyper-3D Pinball / Tilt! gameplay here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9ufwSkB0XQ
* Not to be confused with "Full Tilt!", from which space cadet pinball comes from.
Space Cadet wasn't bundled with Windows, was it? It was included in Microsoft Plus! 98 but not Windows 98.
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It's ridiculous how accurate this recreation is to the original, it looks and feels identical.
The author was able to do this just decompiling the exe files, without looking at the original source code. Basically, completely blind.
So it goes without saying: The deaf, dumb and blind kid sure makes a mean pinball.