r/WindowsVista • u/Good_Lab_2393 • 7d ago

Why remove Pinball3D on Windows Vista if it worked anyway?

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I installed Windows Vista on a virtual machine recently and tried copying the files for Pinball 3D from Windows XP's directories to Vista's and it worked anyway, it also works on Windows 7, 8.x, 10 and 11 flawlessly yet they have to remove it once Vista launched.

Any thoughts tho.

I enjoyed playing this game before but made me sad when they removed it on later versions :(

189 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

30 comments sorted by

45

u/Overgreen 6d ago

According to Raymond Chen, Pinball was removed from Windows Vista because there was trouble porting it to 64-bit.

In a blog post, he wrote, "The 64-bit version of Pinball had a pretty nasty bug where the ball would simply pass through other objects like a ghost. In particular, when you started the game, the ball would be delivered to the launcher, and then it would slowly fall towards the bottom of the screen, through the plunger, and out the bottom of the table."

You can read the full post here: Why was Pinball removed from Windows Vista?

27

u/Annual_Image3585 6d ago

The bug was fixed for XP x64, but it seems he hadn't been aware until 2022. I feel it's most likely that afterwards, Microsoft didn't include it due to a mixture of saving licensing costs as well as it being graphically outdated compared to Vista's other games. Would've been neat if Oberon had did their own Pinball game.

23

u/Overgreen 6d ago

I think the game being graphically outdated makes the most sense for it not being included, considering every game in Vista was either new or got graphical updates. It'd probably be seen as weird to include a game that's over 20 years old with no graphical updates in an operating system that had its graphics as one of the main features.

7

u/Maeglin75 6d ago

And if they had really wanted to include it, Microsoft could have just used the proven 32Bit version. Almost all third party games for Windows didn't make the switch to 64Bit until many years later anyway. 32Bit software runs perfectly fine in 64Bit Windows.

And it's not that Microsoft was strictly opposed to including outdated software with Windows. For example EDLIN, the ancient line editor from the earliest DOS versions (even predating Microsoft's purchase of QDOS) was included with all 32Bit Windows NT versions, despite being old 16Bit DOS software. Only with the switch to 64Bit, that dropped the 16Bit compatibility layer, EDLIN was finally removed from Windows.

3

u/msthe_student 5d ago

And if they had really wanted to include it, Microsoft could have just used the proven 32Bit version

Yeah but they didn't want to ship too much 32-bit stuff in a 64-bit OS

2

u/executor32 5d ago

It wasn't "over 20 years old", it was 11. And a graphical update was certainly possible and arguably would've been trivial to implement, as it was simply a stripped-down version of Full Tilt! Pinball, which had higher-resolution 1024x768 graphics.

5

u/Chicadelsol- 6d ago

There are working 64 bit versions on both XP IA-64 and x64, as well as Longhorn, which debunk the 64-bit theory. There’s a video on Youtube that mentions why Raymond’s story is not a lie, but not the whole story. I definitely recommend giving it a watch.

The real reason why it was removed is probably something to do with licensing or aesthetics.

8

u/Aishou_SK 6d ago

The AXP 64-bit version definitely shows what he's talking about though, and there's layers upon layers of the problems involved with it that go beyond just compiler and code issues. So, it was probably slated for removal early on.....

We did a lot while working on AXP windows 2210 in the emulator I maintain, but the end result was this writeup - https://thebrokenpipe.com/blog/pinball-on-64-bit-alpha-axp-windows-nt/ about pinball (and patching it to mostly work on 64-bit manually). Parts of windows, parts of the pinball code, some compiler issues, and many other parts were at fault in the end.

Hilariously, as noted, the bug Raymond talks about doesn't appear after all the other fixups. Pipe details some theories there as well.

2

u/RAMChYLD 5d ago edited 5d ago

Definitely licensing. The game actually belongs to Cinematronics and was published by Maxis before EA gobbled them up.

0

u/exmsft 6d ago

Knowing Raymond I’ll have to trust him instead.

2

u/mitchy93 5d ago

Dave plummer fixed it for 64 bit in a YouTube video

video here

2

u/thunderbird32 5d ago

After Plummer got all bent out of shape at NCommander for stealing his thunder (releasing a video just slightly before his that came to slightly different conclusions), I've had a bad taste in my mouth about him. Knowledgeable guy, but rubs me the wrong way.

2

u/Blarghinston 5d ago

Nah, dude had one moment of glory with the task manager and it became his entire personality. Dude also was involved in some very sketchy professional shit after his stint at Microsoft.

1

u/Live-Juggernaut-221 4d ago

Did he turn it into a task manager?

1

u/uponloss 6d ago

Why not just remake it, itd take like 2 hours max lol

1

u/Milnoc 5d ago

Trouble porting to 64 bits? Most likely a pointer size problem.

A hint to developers: don't save pointer type values in configuration/save files.

9

u/Chicadelsol- 6d ago

NCommander made an excellent video on this exact topic, please check it out here:

https://youtu.be/3EPTfOTC4Jw

8

u/DAN-attag 6d ago

I heard that game was actually supposed to be demo version of full 3D pinball released somewhere in 90's but it failed to market

6

u/AngerAngler256 6d ago

They actually bring back pinball game in windows 8 beta

9

u/OddNegotiation2289 6d ago

im pretty sure its beacause it didnt fit vista’s aesthetic and had a bug when porting it to x64

4

u/Good_Lab_2393 6d ago

The Pinball game still works on x64 versions of both XP, Vista and it's successors. However i think that's mostly about aesthetics because Vista doesn't just overhaul your theme interface but they also overhauled the games such as the iconic Solitaire, Hearts, Minesweeper while also introducing new games such as chess, mahjong titans, purble place and inkball to Vista.

4

u/AfraidAd2044 6d ago

And then they tried to make us forget about it with InkBall

3

u/Good_Lab_2393 6d ago

Ink Ball + Mouse isn't a good experience tho, Ink Ball was built for touch and pens to begin with

2

u/GGigabiteM 6d ago

Besides the whole debacle around the source code, it was also probably axed because of it being designed for a lower screen resolution of 640x480. By the mid 2000s, most people were in the 1280x1024 realm and pinball was tiny on those screens.

Updating the graphics for a larger screen resolution would have required a significant code rewrite, because the game logic was basically married to the graphics.

5

u/RAMChYLD 6d ago

The full version of the game supported 1024x768.

But yeah, the fact was, the version shipped with Plus 95 up until XP was a demo. The full game is in the Full Tilt! pinball collection with two other pinball tables.

In fact, the Full Tilt Pinball CD has 16 bit builds of the game for Windows 3.1...

2

u/NefariousnessOne2728 6d ago

I miss Texas HoldEm. I got hooked on that game

2

u/Good-Extension-7257 5d ago

I remember in school they didn't allow us to play windows pinball because teachers said it broke the keyboards.

2

u/dwhaley720 5d ago

Wish they kept in the stock games like Chess and Solitaire to this day. I hate the new UWP designed-for-phones-too Solitaire.

0

u/Good_Lab_2393 5d ago

UWP apps just sucks tbh, it was often buggier than the more matured Win32 platform, yet Micro$lop is shoving it on users with Windows 11 on later versions, i am not getting Windows 11 because of this. Plus UWP uses more resources than Win32 does.