Going down the rabbit hole of some of the referenced articles. I read this one [1] about Microsoft's attempts to resurrect the game. The problem seems to be the license agreement does not allow MS to release the game as a standalone copy. Not a lawyer but wouldn't it be pretty easy for MS to just re-license it? MS has a market cap of 2.3T, I think they could swing it without too much of a sweat.
Judging by Cinematronics and the long chain of purchases, closures and divestures, it wouldn't surprise me if there wasn't anybody who even knows who the hell owns the rights at this point. Unfortunately for Microsoft, they're very worth suing and consider it not worth it to have that exposure over Space Cadet Pinball.
No need to relicense and release it again. Space Cadet is part of Full Tilt! Pinball which is hosted online at a certain abandonware website. Until Maxis (or EA) decides to release it again, just download a free copy of it. There are even instructions out there for getting it to work on Windows 10.
According to David Stafford, one of the original developers, Microsoft may still have license to publish it as part of Windows, though the IP still belongs to EA[0]. The whole thread linked below contains a lot of info from the original devs of the game.
David Stafford here. Microsoft has the rights to publish it with Windows. My former Cinematronics co-founders (Mike Sandige, Kevin Gliner) and I would be happy to help it return, gratis.
Off topic, but one of the things I love most about HN is when a person referenced in an article/post/comment happens to be viewing it and chimes in with their first hand experience
> MS has a market cap of 2.3T, I think they could swing it without too much of a sweat.
I could imagine that the rightsholders are aware and would want to exploit it by charging fees significantly higher than what they'd normally charge for something like this, and thus Microsoft isn't biting.
They presumably negotiated a license to include Candy Crush. The original makers of the pinball game may no longer be in business, or may not be responding to Microsoft’s emails.
> Raymond's comment about not being able to find the collision code is a bit absurd. I can't recall if Danny or I named the top-level collision detection function, but it was just named 'pb_collide'.
I've been wondering how I might be able to get a license so that I can make a physical Space Cadet pinball machine. I was thinking about building a single one as a hobby, but it would be a ton of work, so I'd prefer to do it as a business. I would want to make quite a few and sell them or set them up in arcades. I'm sure a lot of people who grew up with Windows XP would see them and put in a few dollars to play it.
AFAIK pinball has been included in various source code leaks of Windows over the years. So you could presumably build it yourself should you somehow get the code, although as noted from this saga it seems to be a bit sensitive to floating point behaviour so might not work right.
It would've presumably been removed from the Windows source code tree circa Vista, so a while before even Windows 8 when ARM32 support started being added, let along ARM64. So I doubt any "official" builds exist.
Yeah it can be emulated many ways just curious if anyone has actually modified or built the original source to arm target natively.
The reply above (currently second) has links to forks that build from source to arm (for switch and android). Looks like the original code is pretty hearty and can be compiled to those targets with minimal code changes (mostly for drawing calls and input mapping).
[1]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20181221-00/?p=10...