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 :)
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).
<<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.)
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.
Countless people have thought about this, IIRC it's not phyiscally 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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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'm surprised there isn't a bigger community around high scores for this game given it's popularity. There's a video of a Chinese person getting 1.2 billion https://www.speedrun.com/3pwsc/forums/3qxfc but the only leaderboards I can find show 26 million as the best score.
edit found another leaderboard with 998 million as the high score, but photo proof for a game that comes with cheats seems wrong.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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
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.)
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.
I wish somebody had as a passion project or company to build Space Cadet into a real physical pinball table.
Countless people have thought about this, IIRC it's not phyiscally 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
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.
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?
Just put one pop bumper there, you could make it work
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?
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.
Hm I understand the bumper part, but what does the line represent? Why does it need to run on the underside?
The line represents a physical tunnel through which the ball can travel.
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.
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.
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'm surprised there isn't a bigger community around high scores for this game given it's popularity. There's a video of a Chinese person getting 1.2 billion https://www.speedrun.com/3pwsc/forums/3qxfc but the only leaderboards I can find show 26 million as the best score.
edit found another leaderboard with 998 million as the high score, but photo proof for a game that comes with cheats seems wrong.
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
I was a fan of "3D Ultra Pinball". You have to keep smacking that glider!
Some of us only had pinball. My parents didn’t buy games, so I got what was included.
Space Cadet wasn't bundled with Windows, was it? It was included in Microsoft Plus! 98 but not Windows 98.
Things included with Plus! packs were often rolled into subsequent versions of Windows, and Pinball is such an example.
It was, but in NT 4.0, 2000, Me and XP.
It was bundled with XP.
Is it legal?