alt.hn

5/10/2026 at 11:22:02 AM

Space Cadet Pinball on Linux

 https://brennan.io/2026/05/09/pinball-and-escrow/

by jandeboevrie

5/10/2026 at 5:59:55 PM

I am one of the original authors of Space Cadet Pinball and I just want to say it is absolutely wonderful there are people who love our old pinball game enough to keep it alive. You made my day.

I am forwarding this post to my Cinematronics co-founders and friends, Mike Sandige (lead engineer) and Kevin Gliner (designer and product manager). They will enjoy seeing this as much as I did.

by davidst

5/10/2026 at 6:34:00 PM

Having a fun game bundled with every Windows install was really something special, so thanks for working on the game and selling it to Microsoft. Without it, we wouldn't have been able to have a Pinball league in my middle school typing class :)

What parts of the game did you work on? Do you have any fun anecdotes about your time working on it, or stories about hard to find bugs?

by ndiddy

5/10/2026 at 7:21:41 PM

I was CEO of Cinematronics (to be clear, we were a tiny startup so a CEO title didn't mean much - everyone pitched in wherever they could help.)

I negotiated the contract with Microsoft. My engineering contribution was not in the gameplay itself but in the game's memory manager and low-level rendering code. That was all performance-critical X86 assembly. I doubt any of that code lives on today.

Yes, there were a lot of anecdotes and the story on Wikipedia is both incomplete and incorrect in some ways. One day, I'll get around to editing it.

My memory is of promising it would be ready in time for Windows 95's launch, working excessively long hours, and focussing hard to make it fast enough so it would be fun to play on the minimum hardware requirement for Microsoft Plus.

by davidst

5/11/2026 at 2:45:40 PM

We had to make sure that Space Cadet ran on the minimum spec Windows machine, which had very little RAM - 4MB I think. On these machines, I made sure the game would run, but it would occasionally pause to swap sound effects when something new happened :)

by mike_san

5/11/2026 at 1:41:25 PM

Wikipedia editor here! It would be much better to write a blog post or something, as anything you add will be removed as unsourced original research

by mghackerlady

5/12/2026 at 4:12:34 PM

[dead]

by cyberdick

5/10/2026 at 7:32:47 PM

Have you read the Wikipedia page recently? It was less complete a couple of years ago

by Randomno

5/10/2026 at 7:49:18 PM

I looked at it today and it is more fleshed out but still incorrect. For example:

> In 1994, the company began development of a port of Doom.

No, we were never porting Doom and we used none of Doom's code or resources. And I didn't propose to tone down the violence. The game was intended to be a fun first-person shooter in the same spirit as Doom but that was the only connection.

Microsoft was involved in a high-profile antitrust suit with the Department of Justice at the time. They were understandably sensitive about the potential PR impact of this type of game shipping with Windows and proposed gameplay design changes to reduce the violence.

by davidst

5/10/2026 at 9:45:29 PM

Are you reading the right page?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinematronics,_LLC

Hasn't been edited since December 2024. Has never mentioned DOOM.

by amiga386

5/10/2026 at 6:10:50 PM

My first time using NT 4, I was setting up a bunch of machines that needed babysitting, and Space Cadet Pinball got me through a lot of long, boring nights.

I've thought back throughout my career to how lucky I was, it kept me from going crazy. Thank you!

by wilj

5/11/2026 at 9:48:23 AM

It is (an understatement to say) with great honor to have the opportunity to tell you (and indirectly the team if they read this): Thank You for making possibly one of the greatest Windows selling points ever, the inclusion of Space Cadet Pinball into its base offering.

SCP has had such a massive influence in my life up to the point of getting into the real world of pinball and becoming semi-professional (or the step prior as pro pinball doesn't exist in this part of the world, yet..).

I've been wanting to ask this forever and until this morning, would have thought I'd have brought this question to my grave:

Would you ever consider going back to the drawing board in an attempt to produce an official follow-up to Space Cadet Pinball?

There are a few generations of people who may be yearning for nostalgia in a world of enshittification, micro-transactions and even worse in the virtual pinball scenes, licensing bullshit that never favors the player.

Disclaimer: I've possibly put too much thought into this already, am willing to put everything I have into this if ever needed... but will need to let you comment first :)

by x______________

5/11/2026 at 3:42:24 PM

> Would you ever consider going back to the drawing board in an attempt to produce an official follow-up to Space Cadet Pinball?

We reached out to Microsoft a few years ago and offered to create a new version at no charge if they would restore it to Windows but they turned us down. There appeared to be no interest on their part.

by davidst

5/11/2026 at 4:49:48 PM

> We reached out to Microsoft a few years ago and offered to create a new version at no charge if they would restore it to Windows but they turned us down. There appeared to be no interest on their part.

Thanks for the prompt reasonse!

I'm inclined to think that the landscape a few years ago has changed drastically and today's world is a lot different: Microsoft is now one of the world's largest gaming houses with their purchases of Mojang, ZeniMax and Activision/Blizzard and the dust from those mergers (should) have settled. A vision for the immediate and near future would certainly be different.

Add the fact that Windows 11 currently has a very poor overall impression with its user base and have publicly pledged that they will work to improve their operating system offering.

There's also a new Xbox leader, Asha Sharma, who has decided to change how the Xbox division is being managed, leading to new ways on how to improve their overall share of the gaming market.

All of the above pertains only towards the initial conception of how Space Cadet was introduced to a generation of fans focused on Microsoft. And despite it being a unique opportunity, it may only be applicable back then. That is no longer necessary now in today's age as you already have an established name, product and reputation. And on the flip side, going the no-charge to previous benefactors may even be detrimental to the overall goal without considering existing gaming solutions like Steam or GoG.

I'd be bold to ask why would you even need their blessing to release an updated or new version but would be quick to dismiss the hurdle as unnecessary, when there are other options and people out there to support your brand and product and to see that your fans blessed are with another table after such a long time.

Looking forward to your feedback!

-x

edit: elusive missing comma

by x______________

5/11/2026 at 5:49:28 PM

> I'd be bold to ask why would you even need their blessing to release an updated or new version

My Cinematronics co-founders and I do not own the rights to any of the games we created. Cinematronics was acquired by Maxis, and Maxis was later acquired by Electronic Arts (who are being acquired, as well.) The rights would have to be untangled which was, I suspect, part of the hesitation Microsoft had in moving forward.

by davidst

5/11/2026 at 9:57:23 PM

Rights aside, would you be willing to explore other options to release a new pinball table to existing fans?

by x______________

5/11/2026 at 10:44:39 PM

Never say never but I think it's unlikely. Our motivation was to restore pinball to Windows (with modern updates) so every Windows user could enjoy it. Any other form of distribution wouldn't have the same coverage or impact. It would have been great to not only please the fans of the old game but to introduce a new generation to pinball just as Space Cadet once did.

by davidst

5/12/2026 at 6:04:53 PM

I appreciate the time you've spent discussing the situation, thank you for that.

While today's gaming landscape is a bit different with hundreds of millions of pc's are running windows, it'd be a quick boon at getting a product out there and promoting the pinball scene (a bit cheeky for other gaming devs but I digress..).. Since it's been a few years, why not reach out to the Microsoft team once more and see what they have to say?

Alternatively, in a potentially smaller yet equally good view, Space Commander Pinball sounds like a great sequel which may not have the legal hurdles currently faced with Cadet. A potential follow-up could be Space Admiral Pinball, allowing the audience to follow through with a full career within the Pinball Space Force.

Whichever route you take, I wish you the best of luck and success! If you ever need to bounce ideas off of, it would be nice to keep in touch.

-X

by x______________

5/11/2026 at 11:51:39 AM

Fellow pinball enthusiast here - I didn't get into it because of SCP, though, but rather grew up with the machines being regularly rotated and maintained in my Dads hamburger shop in the 70's .. halcyon days indeed!

What part of the world are you in that doesn't have a professional pinball tournament roster? Just curious ..

by aa-jv

5/11/2026 at 3:30:34 PM

Hello fellow enthusiast pinball wizard!

Good ol' days indeed! That picturesque glimpse of the past brings a smile to my face! I didn't get more than 1 chance to play physical machines back in the day and only started in the last decade with a machine popping up at my office, to which I became the defacto repairman after it needing maintenance regularly.

I'm located in Prague, Czechia. The pinball scene in the country is basically held by two groups of people: those previously working in the gambling scene changing up their ways and going into the arcade scene, overcharging for tables (3$ dollars and up for 1 game, bought by in-house credits) or the older pinball scene and owners who have been milking out old tables for years on very reduced maintenance cycles, which results in rarely fully working tables.

Despite there being 1 local tournament, one of these options offers anything near IFPA standards.

Geographically speaking and as seen on the pinside map[0], France and Spain have very little areas where there are no machines whileas Germany has barely none. The reason being is that Germany has introduced entertainment laws at require businesses to pay for any machines they may offer to their patrons, resulting in table operators operating at a loss most of the time. That also stops the scene from crossing the border as it virtually doesn't exist, Spanish and French tourists do not come here for pinball whatsoever.

Move further east to Czechia and you have a very small population where most people do not know of the game or even less its local name of "Flipper". Businesses that have went into the pinball scene recently have failed miserably for various reasons but mainly due to pricing/bad business models and lack of international advertising.

Despite the grim situation over here, I'm aware that some efforts are persisting into getting another place set up so the dream of getting an IFPA chapter here is not dead!

Happy to hear your thoughts on it all!

[0] https://pinside.com/pinball/map/mapbox#5.89/49.472/14.274/0/...

by x______________

5/12/2026 at 7:09:36 AM

Ah, very interesting! Here in Austria, we have a number of great tournaments being put on by various private clubs and enthusiast groups - but yes, machines are hard to find, if you don't join these clubs. I recently joined one (FlipperAsyl.at) and have had a lot of fun rejuvenating my youthful interest in this subject, joining tournaments, leasing a machine for my apartment to practice on, designing my own table, and so on. ;)

I have a plan to visit the Pinball Museum in Krakow (Poland) some time this summer .. perhaps similar jaunts are worth the effort? I know for a fact you could come to Vienna for the weekend and get quite satiated, if only at the Prater .. ;)

by aa-jv

5/12/2026 at 9:24:36 PM

That's so cool and I appreciate the recommendation!

I do need to get out of the country soon for a weekend and the Viennese recommendation does sound nice! Looking at the Pinside map[0], there are a few hundred tables to try in the city! I might have to hit you up somehow whenever I finalize travel plans. Also, a few friends have been mentioning the Budapest Pinball museum lately so the idea of visiting there was also in the cards for this summer on top of ?Krakow? (didn't know about that!)

Leasing a table is indeed nice.. I opted to purchase one in an attempt to build a collection but that effort fizzled out but still have a table a few hundred km across the border waiting for me to pick up. I think the universe has better plans tho.. will need to wait and see :)

[0] https://pinside.com/pinball/map/mapbox#10.73/48.1852/16.4336...

by x______________

5/13/2026 at 8:27:51 AM

Oh yes, you could indeed enjoy a fair bit of flipping spinners and bumping dodgers in Vienna, while having all the other great things to see and do as well .. if you time it right, you might even get to participate in a tournament - check the roster at FlipperAsyl.at - I'll see you there. ;)

Didn't know much about the Budapest Pinball museum, but yeah - that's what fellow enthusiasts are for! I'll add that to the Day Trip roster, since Budapest is absolutely gorgeous this time of year .. but I'll do the Krakow day trip in the next few weeks, since it'll be a new (and fascinating) city for me, whereas I've been lost in Budapest too many times to count so far, lol ..

I'm not .. quite yet .. at the point where I will purchase a table, but leasing one for a few months has been very, very rewarding - it was an immediate catalyst for cohesion and mirth among my circle .. we're even printing t-shirts for our Pinball Gang this weekend, hehe.

May your balls drain to great bonus and your bumpers drop like they know how to score!

by aa-jv

5/11/2026 at 8:13:15 AM

As you of course know, since it was bundled with the default install of Windows 2000, we all had in our computer labs. It was a nice break from reality, an evergreen gamer and user experience. Eventually people brought Deluxe Skijump, Doom and Starcraft, but Space Cadet was still a viable option.

by unixhero

5/11/2026 at 2:12:34 AM

What do you think of the source code escrow suggestion at the end?

I'm an external contractor for Software Heritage, not sure if they are currently working on it, but I think they would be an ideal organisation to play that role.

https://www.softwareheritage.org/

by pabs3

5/11/2026 at 2:31:11 PM

Thanks, David! It's great to see the ongoing interest in this game!

by mike_san

5/10/2026 at 6:04:42 PM

kgliner's Hacker News comment from last time is cited on Wikipedia!

by bsimpson

5/10/2026 at 2:08:26 PM

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.

by s20n

5/10/2026 at 3:22:10 PM

I remember in the original there was something you could type when the game was playing the starting sequence (I think it was "hidden test"?) to be able to move the ball with your cursor. I'm curious if this works in this version so I'll probably try it out later when I'm at a computer if no one else has.

edit: It does! I installed the AUR version of it that was linked in the repo README and tested it out, and typing "hidden test" during the game startup sequence lets me drag the ball

by saghm

5/11/2026 at 2:37:29 PM

There were some other easter eggs also that Microsoft ended up disabling. One showed the credits for the folks who worked on the game. If I remember right, it was triggered when you typed "Cinematronics", or maybe "Cinematronics!"... It's been a while since I put that in. And I think there was one that turned the balls into smiley faces, but maybe that was only on the Full Tilt tables.

by mike_san

5/10/2026 at 2:34:31 PM

Just to note, Microsoft provides debug symbols for Pinball

by Randomno

5/10/2026 at 2:10:08 PM

My understanding is you had to NOT look at the disassembled code for a project but have someone else do so and document what they see and that constitutes clean room. Course if I make Claude do the same thing… write a spec from disassembled code, that could work.

by giancarlostoro

5/10/2026 at 6:24:07 PM

With game modding or decompilation, a lot of people do stuff that's probably illegal but whoever owns the rights doesn't care so they do it anyway. Microsoft is fairly hands off with old stuff like this that doesn't do any material damage to their bottom line. For a more serious example, the full leaked source code to Windows NT 4 and XP has been on Microsoft-owned Github for ages and they haven't bothered taking it down, probably because those versions have been out of support for over 10 years at this point.

You can see on this thread that the original developers of Space Cadet Pinball think this is a neat project so I don't see anything morally wrong either.

by ndiddy

5/11/2026 at 11:23:07 PM

I didn't even think about the fact that its STILL on GitHub and they never did a takedown request even before it was on GitHub. It's such old Windows related code, part of it does not surprise me.

by giancarlostoro

5/10/2026 at 2:38:15 PM

Yes this isn't clean-room. Though none of these decompilation projects have been resolved in court yet. re3 (GTA3/Vice City decompilation) developers were sued by Take Two but they settled out of court.

by Randomno

5/10/2026 at 8:02:55 PM

There's openrw which doesn't use re3 code.

by anthk

5/10/2026 at 2:27:13 PM

Clean room needs an independent second party with their own intent. An AI rewrite probably doesn't qualify, since its output traces directly to what it read.

by aykutseker

5/10/2026 at 5:38:00 PM

Maybe it was edited, but from what I see, in the last sentence they said to have Claude make a spec, not to rewrite the code.

by Sophira

5/10/2026 at 3:37:01 PM

Just need two AI for a second party.

by koolala

5/10/2026 at 3:42:20 PM

That also was exposed to proprietary assets or binaries at some point during training

by rvnx

5/12/2026 at 6:40:42 PM

I really doubt that any AI model was ever exposed to the original Space Cadet Pinball game.

by giancarlostoro

5/10/2026 at 8:50:55 PM

I don't think that counts.

by koolala

5/10/2026 at 2:30:29 PM

[dead]

by nullsanity

5/10/2026 at 2:29:37 PM

It's crazy that license laundering is still the primary use case for LLMs.

by andy81

5/10/2026 at 11:58:35 AM

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!

https://pinball.alula.me/

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

by andai

5/11/2026 at 10:55:55 AM

I wonder if they didn't bundle Doom with Windows 95 because, by those days' standards, it was a pretty scary and violent game, and they didn't want to deal with any possible backlash?

by ramenat2am

5/10/2026 at 8:49:08 PM

The CEO refutes that they were working on doom elsewhere in this thread.

by nosrepa

5/10/2026 at 4:46:55 PM

And the version from Full Tilt is a significantly enhanced version of the game. It has multiball, where the Windows bundled version doesn't.

by vikingerik

5/10/2026 at 6:29:33 PM

i've gotten multiball in the Windows version of SpaceCadet, pretty sure I wasn't the victim of the Full Tilt version supply chain attack because while I knew about other tables I've never seen any of them.

by fsckboy

5/10/2026 at 1:44:39 PM

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.

by diegomacario

5/11/2026 at 1:43:55 AM

I love the pinball capture in the middle-far left that "throws" the ball with a mighty effortful groan! Thanks for linking this

by HaZeust

5/11/2026 at 11:54:36 AM

I'm in the middle of a DIY pinball project - all design work and analysis at the moment, including getting a BARRACORA table for a few months to serve as inspiration.

Got any tips and tricks for budding pinball designers? Maybe some notes that didn't make it yet .. ?

by aa-jv

5/10/2026 at 12:20:08 PM

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.)

by unleaded

5/10/2026 at 3:01:04 PM

> I think it's Windows only though (very, tables are all scripted in VBScript and PinMAME is loaded as a COM object).

Fortunately for us, you're wrong :-)

VPX now runs on Linux, Mac, iOS, and Android. And it runs great on those platforms thanks to some pioneering work by the dev jsm174. The VBScript bits are handled using just enough Wine to make it happen but the rest of it is all native. Surround sound feedback (SSF), the Direct Output Framework (DOF), Pinup Popper packs (PUP Packs) etc are all supported as well. The GUI that used to be Windows only is now built into Windows / Mac / Linux versions via ImGUI and can be brought up live during play.

If you want to try it out, log into Github and download the latest action for your platform [0]. Most non-Windows users will want to use the latest version in master as this brings the most amount of parity to the Windows version compared to the 10.8.0 release last year. Use the BGFX version as that has the new multithreaded rendering backend that supports Metal and Vulkan. If you want to learn more, best to check out the Virtual Pinball Chat Discord [1] or poke around the wiki [2].

The devs have been putting in a lot of work to generally make VPX cross platform and it shows. I have built my own Pincab [3] based on it and its amazing.

*Edit*: Should have mentioned that VPX is now supported by Batocera as well, though the VPX version in there is getting a bit long in the tooth.

[0] https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball/actions/workflows/vpinb...

[1] https://discord.gg/BhR9h5aWm

[2] https://github.com/dekay/vpinball-wiki/wiki/About-Visual-Pin...

[3] https://github.com/dekay/vpin-cabinet/

by MegaDeKay

5/10/2026 at 1:14:59 PM

I intuitively feel like more realistic games could be more fun, and that I might just have fondness for Space Cadet from growing up with it; but the more I played other pinball games the more I appreciate that space cadet is a simply great game to play, it feels great and there's a great variety of things to keep you hooked.

I wish I could find another pinball game I enjoyed as much. The closest experiences I could find are Xenotitle and Demon's Tilt but I found them harder to get into and get good at.

The next best thing imo is Yoku's Island Express.

by jgtrosh

5/10/2026 at 3:37:11 PM

I've played a lot of pinball. Space Cadet is a very good pinball game in terms of design, balance, and interest. I wouldn't short it.

by SubiculumCode

5/10/2026 at 1:24:22 PM

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.>>

by flossly

5/10/2026 at 2:44:18 PM

It's not quite FLOSS escrow, but source code escrow is somewhat common among big enterprise software contracts. There are companies that facilitate this, e.g. https://www.escrowcompany.co/source-code-escrow/

by anamexis

5/10/2026 at 3:03:06 PM

Did not know that... Thanks.

by flossly

5/11/2026 at 1:25:36 AM

Software escrow is extremely common. I have worked places with escrow for Windows source code, for example.

by kjs3

5/10/2026 at 3:47:37 PM

I honestly do not think source code will be all that useful. Make it so redistribution, decompilation, reverse-engineering and reimplementation is legal after sales stop and that covers it.

by Asooka

5/11/2026 at 2:22:15 AM

Why wouldn't the source code be useful?

You might need old binaries to build it, but shove those in a VM and you should be good to go. If they used Debian, then they could even publish the exact snapshot.debian.org date to download the binaries from, and which binaries.

Perhaps they had proprietary dependencies they couldn't get the code released for, but then you could port the source code to open equivalents.

by pabs3

5/10/2026 at 5:06:39 PM

You might want to check this one https://archive.org/details/vpinball-x-73-space-cadet for Visual Pinball https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball. There are others that might be even better but JP's is the one that just works without installing and configuring a bunch of other software (https://youtube.com/results?search_query=JP%27s+Space+Cadet - https://youtu.be/UXfohCzilrQ).

Damn amazing how they are making these pinballs today.

More tables here too:

https://vpforums.org/index.php?app=downloads&showcat=50

https://vpuniverse.com/files/category/82-vpx-pinball-tables

https://virtualpinballspreadsheet.github.io

https://nailbuster.com/wikipinup

https://archive.org/search?query=visual+pinball+tables

by eahm

5/10/2026 at 5:11:28 PM

I have struggled to get this project working on non-Windows. It just hangs and crashes no matter what I do or try on Linux/Mac. It's a very Windows-oriented project that's slowly losing the shackles right now.

by freeqaz

5/10/2026 at 5:20:40 PM

Not gonna lie, some tables require way too much work, every software today wants you to be an engineer with 20+ years of some specific experience, what about just double click and let me play the damn game?

by eahm

5/10/2026 at 8:28:01 PM

Yeah, I hear you but as I mentioned in my reply to your other post there is a long-term silver-lining to having a bit of onboarding complexity. I think it's a big reason the VPin community is well into its second decade and still full of passionately committed contributors freely sharing awesome stuff. If you want drive-by casual pinball there are reasonably-priced pinball systems on PS5/XBox/Switch and Steam that are quite good. While VPin has gotten much easier in recent years, it's still a hobby that requires active engagement. VPin rewards that effort by enabling unbelievably high-quality, flexibility, customization, community enhancements and an ever-growing library of amazing content that'll take years to explore.

I think the mismatch is when people see all these awesome pinball games "Fer Free!" and assume they're going to click Install and be playing in a couple minutes. I tell my friends to expect at least a half-hour before first play - and that they'll have to read and follow a couple pages of good (but not perfect) instructions to understand and configure a few different tools. If you want things to work reliably:

* Stick to only Visual Pinball (not older emulators like Future Pinball).

* Install it with Pinup Popper and set up your screen mapping and controls based on one of the standard default configs.

* Run tables released or updated relatively recently (3 yrs or so).

* Run tables from well-known release groups and authors (like Visual Pinball Workshop).

* Wait to run newly released tables until they've been out a month, have >200 of downloads and >20 positive reviews.

* Don't run add-ons which mod tables until you're experienced.

And once you're past the install phase and have a bunch of tables fully working with all the bells and whistles you want, there's a new tool called VPin Studio that's great for maintaining your VPin system https://github.com/syd711/vpin-studio.

Re Linux: I've only ever run VPin on Windows. I've seen posts from happy people who run it on Linux so apparently it can work very well but cross-platform is newer so there's less info on it. On Windows getting a full VPin install working is just a little cantankerous but no worse than you'd expect when you realize it's several open source hobby projects which pass data in various ways and aren't usually directly tested together.

by mrandish

5/10/2026 at 9:26:09 PM

Nice thanks, I might check all this again later.

by eahm

5/10/2026 at 5:35:09 PM

It works fairly well for me in Linux on WINE, even with Visual PinMAME. I believe I used the all-in-one installer (vpx7setup.exe, although there's a later version now).

My GPU is an AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT, if that makes a difference.

by Sophira

5/10/2026 at 7:46:56 PM

have you followed their build instructions? https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball/blob/standalone/standal...

last time i tried on Debian it just worked... their developer testing app also works flawlessly on Android. Arch Linux has an AUR package with the last git and i updated it yesterday and played a bit before bed

by luqtas

5/10/2026 at 6:05:52 PM

I'd be curious to play a VR table, but the amount of tinkering required exceeds my curiosity.

by bsimpson

5/10/2026 at 7:12:32 PM

+1 on Visual Pinball, it's really mind-blowingly great and supported by a huge, very active community of artists and table developers. For anyone who doesn't yet know, there are hundreds of high-quality tables with a dozen or more new releases every week. While there are new, original tables which do things no physical pinball table can, many are lovingly hand-crafted recreations of commercial pinball machines including all the legendary classics from the 1950s to the 2000s. Any table you remember from your teen years is very probably already emulated.

Much like the MAME project is preserving arcade games before they are lost, the VPin community is doing historical preservation so future generations can enjoy these electro-mechanical machines. Under the hood in Visual Pinball the pinball machine ROMs are emulated by a special version of MAME called PinMAME, while Visual Pinball does the 3D rendering and physics simulation.

The majority of users play VPin on desktop with a keyboard but in the same way some MAME players add dedicated arcade buttons and joysticks or even a dedicated arcade cabinet, VPin supports running in a cabinet which looks like a pinball machine but has a flat-screen where the playfield would be as well as flipper buttons and a real plunger to launch the virtual ball.

VPin supports stereo sound but can also use the extra channels from a standard PC sound card's 7.1 output to drive effects like a subwoofer, bass shaker and up to four channels of positional haptic feedback for realism you don't just hear but feel. I was shocked at how accurately the transducers recreate the feel of real pinball bumpers and slingshots firing inside the cabinet down to the subtle vibration of a metal ball rolling across a wood playfield. In my cabinet I even added flipper solenoids from a pinball machine under the screen where the flippers are rendered. I can vouch for the net effect feeling authentic since my VPin cab sits in our game room next to 8 real pinball machines and a custom MAME arcade cab.

If you're interested in trying out Visual Pinball I strongly recommend starting with the Pinup Popper auto-installer that @eahm linked above (https://nailbuster.com/wikipinup/doku.php). All of this amazing goodness is the result of several different projects which work seamlessly together but installing it all in the right order and places can be confusing the first-time. Having to actually RTFM a bit to do my first install was slightly annoying but I now realize not being one-click user friendly is an upside. It keeps the VPin hobby in that ideal zone where it's just complex enough to limit drive-by casuals from mob spamming an otherwise super-fun, completely free, retro-adjacent hobby and that's why there's still a highly-engaged, knowledgeable community.

by mrandish

5/10/2026 at 4:26:40 PM

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.

by cbondurant

5/10/2026 at 5:21:57 PM

> Any alternative is better than the current state of things.

I don't know, the incentives for creators are already low enough. Any book one writes lands immediately in Anna's Archive and is digested into LLM slop for the profit of Altman & Co. Any piece of investigative journalism, when shared here or on Reddit, sees a link to some paywall-bypass site as one of the most upvoted comments. So we are already in a Bastiat's window situation where people are disincentivized to produce creative work. I'd rather not put the work of software creators even more at risk of being cheaply copied and copyright laundered: any state vault would be an easy target for trillion-dollar corporations.

Aside, as someone doing retro reverse engineering I greatly appreciate the author's words about the tension between software preservation and the need to reward creators for their work.

by alberto-m

5/10/2026 at 5:28:09 PM

> Any piece of investigative journalism, when shared here or on Reddit, sees a link to some paywall-bypass site as one of the most upvoted comments.

That is generally because they're on random sites that want you to subscribe for a year to read the one piece that was mentioned on the sites you read... not going to happen, sorry.

by nottorp

5/10/2026 at 8:37:34 PM

How this worked for printed news back in the dark ages was:

A friend told you about an article, or a headline piqued your interest.

You could anonymously hand a negligible payment (few cents or dollars in cash) to an intermediary (the newspaper seller at the street corner) to get access to all the content published for a certain time period (daily/weekly/monthly issue of the publication).

Now a "friend" (for example a HN post) still tells you about an article. Unfortunately you can't get an issue, they want an ongoing commitment. It's not anonymous, you have to create an account. The intermediaries are gone though, is that a good thing?

by nottorp

5/10/2026 at 11:54:48 AM

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...

by kowalski7cc

5/10/2026 at 12:04:33 PM

I wish somebody had as a passion project or company to build Space Cadet into a real physical pinball table.

by nh2

5/10/2026 at 12:17:43 PM

Many people have thought about this, IIRC it's not physically possible to build because there is a lane that goes under a bumper (which in real life they extend down quite a bit) https://files.catbox.moe/pnaeri.png

by unleaded

5/10/2026 at 1:19:19 PM

Assuming that it's about moving the ball unseen (which makes it much easier) from the sink hole higher on the table to the apparent ejection hole and kicker low on the table.

One could have the ball go quite low below the table surface and then use some kind of mechanical kicker to get it up to table level again near the bottom. It's possibly a unique problem, but seems to be much less work than building the rest of the table.

by ahartmetz

5/10/2026 at 1:24:44 PM

Or just have a different ball ready to come out of the exit hole, the top hole would swallow ball 1, and a different ball could exit after a realistic delay...

A bit like Star Trek teleportation.. is it you, or a copy of you?

by netsharc

5/10/2026 at 4:53:33 PM

Several real pinball tables do this, keep a hidden ball staged to make it seem to instantly reappear. The Rick & Morty machine in particular does this - you can shoot into a portal, and the ball (actually a different hidden one) reappears instantly some distance away.

by vikingerik

5/10/2026 at 2:28:54 PM

Pop bumpers on an elevated/overlay playfield seems like a nightmare in general, maintenance would be a big pain. I can't think of a machine that has a pop like that, but my internal pinball database is getting pretty dusty.

You might be able to make the kickback lane work with a subway or maybe make the machine a widebody and go around the mess?

by toast0

5/10/2026 at 12:30:42 PM

Hm what's the problem with that? I understand that the bumper extends down, but what else needs to be on the underside that makes this unbuildable?

by stavros

5/10/2026 at 12:57:20 PM

I think it's because the bumpers on top (the white things with the blue dot in the middle) need a lot of space underneath and the line runs through the space that they would need.

by BadBadJellyBean

5/10/2026 at 1:00:20 PM

Hm I understand the bumper part, but what does the line represent? Why does it need to run on the underside?

by stavros

5/10/2026 at 1:10:34 PM

The line represents a physical tunnel through which the ball can travel.

by jjmarr

5/10/2026 at 1:12:12 PM

Oh, there's a hole at the top of the line that leads to an underground lane? That makes sense, I couldn't make that out in the photo, thanks.

by stavros

5/10/2026 at 2:32:22 PM

If you drain to the far left, and kickback is lit, the ball gets sent along the line and comes out the top (and IIRC, refills your fuel?)

by toast0

5/10/2026 at 2:36:24 PM

Oh that whole thing is a higher level! I see now, I thought that top section is actually a ground section, thanks.

by stavros

5/10/2026 at 2:42:28 PM

The purple thing is an overlay... There's the ramp, the three lanes (with lights), three blue mini pop bumpers, and then the ball drops into the inlane for the left flipper.

The kickback puts the ball into the left orbit, which is at ground level, the ball will hit the spinner and then IIRC cause it's outside the crop, it goes into the lanes at the top of the playfield, and into the pop bumper area there.

by toast0

5/10/2026 at 1:33:41 PM

Just put one pop bumper there, you could make it work

by wileydragonfly

5/10/2026 at 1:30:02 PM

I suggested this to a Stern employee 21 years ago, which obviously went nowhere. Back then they were trying to do a Halo machine, which also went nowhere.

by wileydragonfly

5/10/2026 at 12:37:22 PM

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.

by adito

5/10/2026 at 3:06:16 PM

That would be doing something nice for the user at the expense of doing slightly less funneling traffic to their app store where they make their money on adtech and access fees.

We wouldn't want to leave any money on the table in the pursuit of a better product, would we?

by willis936

5/11/2026 at 3:27:58 AM

Space Cadet (Pinball) has the most direct answer: it was written largely in x86 assembler and didn't survive a 64-bit translation attempt. Raymond Chen says the ball would ghost off the table, fall down and end the game in seconds when trying to run in 64-bit math. Raymond even takes personal responsibility for the failure to keep Space Cadet alive and disappointment it didn't survive past Windows XP:

https://web.archive.org/web/20160205141748/https://blogs.msd...

The larger answer to the rest of the games seems to be related: Windows trying to shrink its non-cross platform code "liabilities" and things it needed to translate between processor architectures. The games were never a priority for the Windows team. Most were either intern projects and/or contracted from "second party vendors". In Windows 8, Microsoft decided to completely contract all of the games to a second party, the strange and sometimes controversial Arkadium [1]. The Arkadium Solitaire and Minesweeper were installed by default for a while, but as Arkadium started injecting more ads and also quickly increasing the install sizes of the games, Microsoft did the natural thing and removed them as default installs so people would stop complaining about their size and/or ads and instead just adding shortcuts to install them from the Store.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkadium

by WorldMaker

5/10/2026 at 2:04:28 PM

Please describe the precise ROI with $1M in research and studies, that will show an OS vendor will make a profit on such bundles.

(I can't imagine any other reason why, except maybe bug reports)

by b112

5/10/2026 at 2:24:25 PM

I remember kids begging their parents to play Brick Breaker on their parents blackberries. Of course this was before young children having iPads was normalized

by morkalork

5/10/2026 at 1:46:57 PM

Google play games comes with a offline copy of snake, solitaire, minesweeper, and a few others. I'm not sure if that's bundled with phones or not, and the games are kinda hidden. I only found out about them because they come up if you try to search Google play without a connection.

by RobotToaster

5/10/2026 at 6:56:35 PM

I love this, I used to play this game a lot when I was bored at my brothers place, he only had a Windows computer.

Just a few notes in the age of supply chain scares, don't install flatpak as root if you don't have to, and in this case you might want to use flatpak mask com.github.k4zmu2a.spacecadetpinball after installing, seeing as flatpak updates all its installed flatpaks otherwise. It's a project that hasn't seen updates in 2 years and really shouldn't see any updates considering its nature, so let's keep it that way.

by INTPenis

5/10/2026 at 5:54:37 PM

It's so cool that we keep playing the games we "had to" (as they were what we have in the PC) when I was young. This week I've seen this guy do something I could never have when I was a child in this game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLukzzvvULU

by lvirgili

5/10/2026 at 12:22:03 PM

Space Cadet wasn't bundled with Windows, was it? It was included in Microsoft Plus! 98 but not Windows 98.

by stavros

5/10/2026 at 1:46:05 PM

It was actually part of Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95. It wasn't directly available for Windows 98 at all, but the Windows 98 install disc does include an INF file so you can install it, provided you have a copy of Plus! for Windows 95.

It was also included with Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, Windows Me, and Windows XP (both the original and x64 versions). Finally removed in Vista to never return.

by chungy

5/10/2026 at 12:46:48 PM

Things included with Plus! packs were often rolled into subsequent versions of Windows, and Pinball is such an example.

by TazeTSchnitzel

5/10/2026 at 12:26:32 PM

It was, but in NT 4.0, 2000, Me and XP.

by seba_dos1

5/10/2026 at 12:26:00 PM

It was bundled with XP.

by GranPC

5/11/2026 at 12:34:59 AM

One thing that keeps me from playing the web port is its inability to store the high score leaderboard upon reload. I don't have a Linux desktop at the moment so I wonder if this problem is solved in this version.

by azayrahmad

5/10/2026 at 1:43:35 PM

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.

by TheAceOfHearts

5/10/2026 at 4:14:49 PM

All good pinball players tilt. Owners can make the machine "loose" or "tight" (at least that what we used to call it.) A loose machine allows a lot of tilting, and a tight one only allows slight nudges.

If the ball is coming straight down the middle, there's no choice but to tilt. A really good player will be able to tilt the tightest machine enough to get that ball to a flipper. Also, a really good player is better at judging "straight down the middle" and choosing not to tilt at all. Anybody who is reasonable at pinball can play for an infinite amount of time on a very loose machine.

It's not actually a factor that can be removed from pinball. You can't have machines tilting when people just lean against them, or when a player pushes a flipper button energetically. The owner has to pick some threshold. They're irredeemably physical games.

by pessimizer

5/11/2026 at 12:11:33 AM

This is all correct. To add some additional colour, the “slap save” is a form of tilting a beginner player can learn easily. If the ball is coming almost down the middle (but not exactly so), slap the flipper button of the closest flipper when the ball gets close. Slap it quickly with your flat hand. Slap it HARD.

The sharp impulse won’t trigger the tilt mechanism, but it may displace the playfield just enough for the flipper to touch the ball when it otherwise wouldn’t. If all goes well the ball will deflect to the other (lowered) flipper, bounce off it, and allow you to continue play in front of your amazed friends.

by nonfamous

5/10/2026 at 1:56:03 PM

Yes tilting an actual pinball machine is very legitimate. On the other end, pinball machines have adjustable legs and the arcade owner will make adjustments to the machine to throw people off. Not daily, but when they notice someone is constantly earning free plays, they will take action. Any minor changes will cause the ball to take slightly different paths.

by SapporoChris

5/10/2026 at 2:37:24 PM

It's been forever since I played space cadet, but skillful nudging is beneficial in many video pinballs. A little nudge here and there helps save balls from the drain and can help make some shots.

by toast0

5/10/2026 at 12:16:19 PM

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.

by eterm

5/10/2026 at 12:42:28 PM

Pinball Dreams first on a friend's Amiga and then my PC for me, later Pro Pinball. Space Cadet was hopeless garbage in comparison. Space Cadet had a boring table, much worse graphics and sound, and terrible ball physics.

I still applaud the Linux version for its hack value :)

by ahartmetz

5/10/2026 at 5:09:30 PM

After watching a video, it seems like I misremembered the ball physics, but the rest seems more or less correct. The sound effects sound really cheap, the music... exists, and in the lower center of the table, there is... uh, a star-shaped gradient thing? That is usually where the most elaborate graphics of the table are! Like a cool spaceship or the space cadet or evil aliens or whatever.

by ahartmetz

5/10/2026 at 2:22:58 PM

I loved playing Epic Pinball and especially the music. Exactly the kind of sound I enjoy. I collected mod files on floppies as a kid.

Other pinball games are bland and boring to me.

by tosti

5/10/2026 at 12:34:26 PM

Yeah the Pro Pinball series cstarted arriving around the same time as Windows 95. I guess people liked the Windows game because it was just a few clicks away.

by MetaWhirledPeas

5/10/2026 at 12:38:34 PM

Some of us only had pinball. My parents didn’t buy games, so I got what was included.

by peddling-brink

5/10/2026 at 12:57:33 PM

I was a fan of "3D Ultra Pinball". You have to keep smacking that glider!

by the__alchemist

5/10/2026 at 6:57:38 PM

This was referenced at the bottom of the linked article.

And yeah, I'm a big fan, too. I still have the CDs for it, and it still runs in Windows 11!

by CWuestefeld

5/10/2026 at 1:26:32 PM

It's really no surprise: it's a game that was pre-installed on hundreds of millions of computers. That's it. For people of a certain age it's very very likely they have played it, at least a bit.

by andrepd

5/10/2026 at 3:13:39 PM

Honestly my favorite pinball game of all time is not at all realistic: Devil Crush (I think it was called Devil Crash in the USA). It has been released on both the pcengine and the megadrive. For some reason I tend to prefer the pcengine more despite the graphics quality being a bit below, probably because of the more "dirty" sounding soundtrack. This is my main occupation when I am flying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-7iC8z6q8s&t=7

by prmoustache

5/10/2026 at 3:46:27 PM

Define better.

by SubiculumCode

5/11/2026 at 2:50:08 AM

It had a "plot". You "upgraded weapons"

...also it was what you played when you had no internet

by alex1138

5/10/2026 at 12:41:51 PM

Is it legal?

by andreapaiola

5/10/2026 at 2:56:35 PM

Who cares?

by hggh

5/10/2026 at 7:16:39 PM

The guy you're responding to obviously cares. Being dismissive of his desire to do the right thing is kind of rude.

by bigstrat2003

5/11/2026 at 1:15:07 PM

Right thing == ethical != legal

by hggh

5/10/2026 at 4:12:35 PM

[dead]

by wrwwww