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.
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.
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.
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.>>
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/
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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...
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.>>
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 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.
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.
While we’re at it, I’d love to see a physical version of the seseame street pinbal table [2], though that one might be a bit more ambitious. :)
[1] - https://spacecadetpinball.wordpress.com
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZshZp-cxKg
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?
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.
A bit like Star Trek teleportation.. is it you, or a copy of you?
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.
https://snapcraft.io/space-cadet-pinball
(I can't imagine any other reason why, except maybe bug reports)
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.
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.
Other pinball games are bland and boring to me.
I still applaud the Linux version for its hack value :)