Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
parkertomatoes
garaetjjte
More sleuthing on that bug story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EPTfOTC4Jw
mbg721
This is my obligatory old-guy post that Space Cadet was one of three tables in the package "Full Tilt Pinball" released by Maxis (along with Skulduggery and Dragon's Keep) which came in its entirety for free with the puzzle game Marble Drop, which was apparently only ever liked by me. So if you want the full set of tables and can 64-bit-ify the installer, the Marble Drop CD might be easy to come by.
greyface-
https://archive.org/details/marble-drop
Looks like the Marble Drop stuff won't run without the installer, but the Full Tilt executables run off the CD just fine.
pdntspa
Note that that edition of Space Cadet has slightly different scoring than the windows version
I had those tables in their box years ago. Skulduggery and Dragons Keep were a lot of fun!
garaetjjte
Fun fact: tracks that marbles are travelling along in Marble Drop are actually 3D.
pr337h4m
Source code: https://github.com/alula/SpaceCadetPinball
rand0m4r
nice ... it would be nice to know how to play though
jkingsman
z and forward slash for left and right bumpers. Press and hold space to pull back launch plunger and release to launch. x and period to tilt table.
Worth noting that F8/Player Controls dialogue doesn't work, and neither does disabling the music.
compsciphd
I'm not sure I ever knew you could tilt the table. child me wishes he had this knowledge. (I assume if you tilt too much it triggers a tilt failure?)
skitter
> z and forward slash for left and right bumpers. Press and hold space to pull back launch plunger and release to launch. x and period to tilt table.
Apparently these are used regardless of keyboard layout.
aledalgrande
or left/right click for bumpers
wyclif
z and forward slash don't seem to work on macOS.
rand0m4r
thanks
Brendinooo
Played this game for hours as a kid. My mom and I printed out the directions so we could read up on all the missions and promotions and stuff.
Having tried other pinball games here and there, this definitely became the standard that I judged everything else by. The physics just feel really good, and the gameplay was a wonderful mixture of skill and flashiness without ever feeling like it was too overwhelming. Just solid from top to bottom.
strictnein
I'm right there with you. Once you understood what you were doing in the game, it felt like more than pinball, it felt like you were playing a game with the pinball machine, if that makes sense. Going on missions, getting promotions, etc were things you could actively pursue. Fun times.
LaLaLand122
Aren't there pinball games any more? I remember spending a lot of hours playing Pinball Fantasies and Pinball Illusions in an Amiga 1200.
compsciphd
Epic's shareware pinball game, paid for the development of the initial version of unreal. Epic as we know it today doesn't exist without pinball.
1123581321
I’d heard it as ZZT paid for Jill of the Jungle which let them afford Unreal’s longer development cycle while releasing other games (like Epic Pinball.) Epic Pinball and ZZT were two of my favorite games from the 90s.
compsciphd
see quote here - https://web.archive.org/web/20001006000731/http://www.gamesd...
The next game was Epic Pinball, and it was a huge hit. We estimate that it was the 3rd most successful shareware game ever created. Epic Pinball basically funded the startup of Digital Extremes as well as funding a lot of the development of Unreal.
and here
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/from-the-past-to-the-fu...
Jazz Jackrabbit was your highest selling shareware game at the time? What was your highest selling shareware game overall?
TS: Of all time? That was Epic Pinball.... (and more cut)
adamrezich
Pinball FX3 (available on Steam, and other platforms) is pretty good if there's specific real-world tables you're interested in playing. Volume 1 has Medieval Madness, which I have logged far too many hours in.
agentwiggles
Medieval Madness is my all time favorite table. I recently bought the version for Pinball FX3, and it's not half bad. I could complain about all kinds of things about PinballFX3, it's very emblematic of the problems with modern gaming, but the tables themselves are pretty good recreations.
It's nowhere near as fun as real pinball, but the one thing that I found really cool was that I was able to play the game on "training mode" and get a better sense for the different things I could do and how to set up certain situations.
My best Medieval Madness score is something like 50,000,000... the table I play on has a high score of about 190,000,000 so I have a long way to go to have a chance at putting in my initials. But I can generally go for a pretty long session on a single credit. Even still, I hadn't ever seen half the stuff that I got to see while playing the virtual version, and I've taken some of that knowledge into the real world when I visit the bar where that table lives.
So overall, digital pinball is cool in my book, if flawed.
Quick edit/addition: Medieval Madness is unique among nearly all the tables I've played in that it doesn't bullshit you much. Most of the time when I lose balls, I know exactly the wrong thing I did (in particular, trying to hit the castle gate or the trolls without multiball is pretty dangerous). Most tables I've played will suck up a credit in a few flips in ways that seem pretty unfair, but Medieval Madness seems pretty fair. I would love to own a table but they're shockingly expensive, maybe someday!
toast0
> I would love to own a table but they're shockingly expensive, maybe someday!
MM has always been on the higher end (or at least for the last long while). And pricing went crazy during covid. But it's a great table, so there's that. Probably fiddly to keep working with all the dodadds though. Personally, I like the very end of the alphanumeric era, right before DMDs came and started stopping the game to show you animations, but collectors seem to prefer DMD games.
Most games you can do a good job of advancing the plot by just shooting for the flashing shots, but maybe avoid center shots, unless you have a good setup, because a missed shot may be hard to recover, although the trolls can be hard to recover from a hit too. Advancing the plot usually results in good scores.
In terms of video pinball that's not virtual physical tables, Demon's Tilt is fairly new, and pretty fun. I was deeply amused when I got a ball stuck and had to use the 'call attendant feature' and got some sort of bonus. But like a lot of video pinball, at some point it is too much a game of skill, and you can have epic ball times and then it's kind of boring.
Yoku's Island Express is also interesting, it's several years old now, and widely ported. It's an adventure game with pinball segments. Boss battles are pretty fun, imho
adamrezich
this is exactly why I bought Pinball FX3, my local barcade got a Medieval Madness table and I remember liking it as a kid, and I wanted to learn more about how the game works beyond "put a few quarters in and hit some flippers until stuff happens", without having to keep pumping fifty cents in time after time.
I think the depth that pinball tables (I'm not enough of a buff to feel comfortable calling them "pins" ...yet) have is hugely underrated. I remember learning about the objectives you can go for in Space Cadet but I was blown away by all the different systems/table features/etc. in MM! so much to learn and keep track of at once, but once you start to get the hang of it, playing & learning more is incredibly addictive. my MM high score in PFX3 is somewhere around 50M (with the hugely unfair default, not "realistic" physics—though I play both), but I haven't been able to get anywhere near that irl just yet.
it is interesting just how much irl pinball physics differ from their virtual counterparts, there really is nothing quite like it.
also, for those unaware, some Medieval Madness trivia:
- a pre-famous Tina Fey voices of some of the princesses
- Tim Kitzrow does his NBA JAM shtick as the joust announcer, and even BOOMSHAKALAKAs sometimes
- there's very occasional "Toasty!" and "FATALITY" samples from Mortal Kombat (Dan Forden, the Toasty Guy, did sound for both games)
really, if you're a fan of pinball/arcade history, it's just a real treat, sort of a culmination of the Williams/Midway arcade scene, in some ways.
stevenwoo
We had a Star Trek Next Generation table in one of my workplaces and that required a technician to service it once every other month or so (it was free play but only a few of us played it much) so you'll need to budget for that or learning to do that part yourself.
aidenn0
Something that no video pinball communicates compared to a physical table is just how violent it is. The force with which the steel ball is launched deflected and bounces is really quite visceral.
a_t48
I also wish MM wasn't so dang expensive. :(
prawn
One that I play is PinOut - it's more of a pathway than a table though, in case you're a purist. Looks great and decent music also.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pinout/id1108417718
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mediocre.p...
NetOpWibby
+1 for PinOut, looks great on a large iPad. I’ve managed to reach the end several times, in one sitting. Lovely game.
CharlesW
There are! Digital/virtual pinball is huge.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2021/07/atgames-legends-virtu...
TedDoesntTalk
But they are physical devices with screens for playfields. I think OP means for laptops/desktops.
CharlesW
The first article focuses on form-authentic cabinets, but the software that powers those (like the open-source Visual Pinball, the freeware Future Pinball, the commercial Pinball FX3, etc.) work on ordinary laptops/desktops too.
rzzzt
One or both of these had an MS-DOS port with VGA graphics (smooth scrolling!) and excellent MOD playback using PC speaker output.
gwill
i recently discovered demons tilt and enjoy it a lot: https://store.steampowered.com/app/422510/Demons_Tilt/
syntheweave
Phone apps are close to ideal for a quick game of pinball - touchscreen controls are not perfect, but they are "good enough."
The best "originals" on phone are in Pinball Deluxe Reloaded, which sticks to a flat 2D design.
Pinball FX(Zen Studios) is the runner up and has a series of apps dedicated to its originals and licenses. It tries to have a 3D camera, which isn't the best experience on a tiny screen.
Pinball Arcade and Zaccaria both have apps. The content is pretty good but they haven't been maintained properly to work well on the phone. I still sunk hours and hours into Pinball Arcade despite it having a broken camera implementation in vertical aspect.
sandreas
Great project... unfortunately nearly unplayable with german keyboard layout because you have to hold shift for a /. Player controls are not working, so no dice... I would raise an issue, but that is not possible in this project, because it's a fork... :-/
ggerules
Left and right mouse buttons. Hover the central wheel button over the piston launcher, while pressing the wheel button, rotate the wheel towards you to deploy the launcher. Sorry I don't know pin-ball lingo. There are probably other keyboard interfaces for this......
sandreas
Except you are on a notebook and have no mouse... I apologize for being a nitpicker but I really could not play it after trying some things out...
I love this project and would love to play the game, but at least two keys on my keyboard would be necessary...
teo_zero
Temporarily switching to a different keyboard layout in your SO settings shouldn't be that difficult, though.
zakki
I'm using mbp 2014, and 1 finger press is "z" button replacement. and 2 fingers press is "/" button replacement.
boringg
Am I the only one who found this game to be super frustrating for some reason? Still tons of memories though.
Arrath
Its digital pinball why does it have coin-sucking ways for lose the ball without recourse??
Or do I just not know the deep lore of pinball and how to keep the blockers deployed in the side routes 100% of the time.
narag
It was easy for me after enough hours playing, IIRC I had a ~100M record... must have the record file anywhere.
Actually I have the game installed in Windows 10, but I no longer play it. I lost the aim in the central targets that give endless extra balls.
chewonbananas
How did you install it on win10?
narag
Hi, hope you're still there.
I don't remember doing anything special. Just copied the files from my older laptop in a writable directory, not under Program Files, but under my user home dir.
Let me know if you have any problem with that.
jasonjmcghee
This version has a pretty low frame rate, it's just not very snappy. I downloaded the version on the Microsoft store and it works just like I remember.
_nivlac_
I was able to get better performance by increasing the FPS to 120 in Options -> Graphics
undefined
rzzzt
I can turn off music for ~3 seconds, then it starts up again.
zb3
As a workaround, you can put the following "conditional breakpoint" on the "this.requests[name] = this;" line in the SpaceCadetPinball.js file (formatted):
(name.includes('MID') && (this.end=this.start)),0
battles
Same. I didn't even know this game had music. It's ruining my nostalgia high.
hxugufjfjf
Would kill for a way to play on a mobile browser. Currently only the left flipper works when tapping the screen
lxgr
Nice! I was half expecting this to point to an instance of the excellent v86 [1], but this one has definitely less overhead :)
generationP
Nice, but can't turn off the music and can't change the zoom/resolution. Also, left/right-click might be bad items since the browser occasionally hijacks them back from the javascript.
jstanley
Right click the tab title bar, "Mute tab".
generationP
Yeah, figured out that much. But the emulation has its own internal menu, which claims to do the same but doesn't. Shouldn't be a tough one to fix :)
mnky9800n
This made me remember growing up playing glider, a game where you are a paper airplane navigating a house or some other location staying aloft on warm air currents and avoiding obstacles such as candles, furniture, and other paper airplanes. This led me here:
https://github.com/kodogo/Glider
A JavaScript port of the game. For some reason I put hours into this game which is strange because I remember playing it on a Mac and I never owned one as a child.
Get the top HN stories in your inbox every day.
All nostalgia aside, TIL that superfans reverse engineered "Space Cadet" from binary code [1] the same way they did Mario 64 [2]. Not only that, they've ported the result to use SDL and execute in the browser under Emscripten. A super-impressive technical accomplishment with a beautifully tangible result, wow!
My favorite bit - the reverse engineering process seems to have fixed the 64-bit bug Raymond Chen blogged about [3]
> I did not find it, decompiled game worked in x64 mode on the first try.
> It was either lost in decompilation or introduced in x64 port/not present in x86 build.
> Based on public description of the bug (no ball collision), I guess that the bug was in TEdgeManager::TestGridBox
[1] https://github.com/k4zmu2a/SpaceCadetPinball.
[2] https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64
[3] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220106-00/?p=10...