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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...

More sleuthing on that bug story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EPTfOTC4Jw
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.
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.

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!

Fun fact: tracks that marbles are travelling along in Marble Drop are actually 3D.
Source code: https://github.com/alula/SpaceCadetPinball
nice ... it would be nice to know how to play though
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.

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.
Aren't there pinball games any more? I remember spending a lot of hours playing Pinball Fantasies and Pinball Illusions in an Amiga 1200.
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.
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.
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...

One or both of these had an MS-DOS port with VGA graphics (smooth scrolling!) and excellent MOD playback using PC speaker output.
i recently discovered demons tilt and enjoy it a lot: https://store.steampowered.com/app/422510/Demons_Tilt/
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.

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... :-/
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......
Am I the only one who found this game to be super frustrating for some reason? Still tons of memories though.
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.

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.

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.
I can turn off music for ~3 seconds, then it starts up again.
Would kill for a way to play on a mobile browser. Currently only the left flipper works when tapping the screen
Nice! I was half expecting this to point to an instance of the excellent v86 [1], but this one has definitely less overhead :)

[1] https://copy.sh/v86/

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.
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.

OMG I've been looking for this for so long, it made me so happy!
Sweet! I forget about this game entirely, fun memories of being distracted from doing something more productive. I just need Yahoo!'s old pool game from early 2000s.
I wasn't expecting it to work on touch-only devices but the left "leg" worked. But the right "leg" didn't. Is it possible to let it work on touch devices by dividing the screen into two halves such that tap on left register for left and tap on right registers on right? Or is the intention here to keep it vintage and not make it work on touch devices?
Well, it was fun up until I closed the tab by holding down right-click for too long and accidentally activating a mouse gesture. Whoops, that feature wasn't in the original...
Now all I need is rock-paper-scissors from ICQ without ICQ and my collection is almost complete.
Love it.

Makes me miss Pinball Construction Set (and a host of other stuff from my C64 but I’ll stop there).

The physics seem really off. Almost no power out of the paddles for instance.
Any reason why the game window remains minimized in my browser?
I already have this installed on Steam Deck, but this is great too!
i spent so much of my childhood in this game. so glad to see it back but grown up me doesnt find the appeal of wasting so much time anymore. kinda sad to see my childhood go.
OMGGG so many memories
Doesn't seem to work with Microsoft Edge :/
This game was my jam back Webern I was 10.
typing 'hidden test' before launching the ball still activates the same cheat as the original :)
This brings back memories!!

You can also play Pinball in Word 97:

>1. Open a new document

>2. Type "Blue"

>3. Select word

>4. Go to Format -> Font

>5. Choose Font Style Bold, Color Blue

>6. Type " " (space) after word "Blue"

>7. Go to Help -> About

>8. Ctrl-Shift-Left click the Word icon/banner

>9. Use Z for left flipper, M for right flipper, and ESC to exit

I got banned for a spell from the library computers in middle school because they had a "no games" policy. I think in retrospect, the real concern was random young men like myself, fresh into puberty, loading up the machines with god knows what, but of course they lacked communication skills to express that (hence becoming a sped librarian), so instead we got into a (metaphorical) pissing match that ended with me banned from the computers for... well I think it was allegedly six months, but they lasted about a week before they realized if I stopped asking their informal IT questions, they'd have to bring in an extremely expensive consultant, caved, and let me back on if I promised "not to install games" -- and then we got into pretty much the same argument yet again when once again my shortbus was late, and I tried to sit quietly playing pinball since saying anything out loud risked someone engineering an excuse to put their hands on me and deviate my septum again.

(In case you can't tell from the tone of this post, I'm still raw that when I had Bill Goddman Lichetenstein blowing up my burner email, all I did was do a cutesy unpaid "it gets better" essay for Boing Boing rather than waste my 20s on STEM policy only to find out all I had to do is tell a crowd "Why do we tolerate Mike Doyle and his weird little sex cult" and they'd have a crowd outside Peduto's house in less time than it takes to watch an episode of prestige television.

(It doesn't get better, BTW. Maybe in Seattle or whatever, but if you're a queer, autistic millennial in Appalachia, you need to make some people think every system around them, electronic or physical, might fail if they don't do what you say in order to get them to treat you with the same deference and respect they give elderly pedophiles who control so called civil society.)

Anyways, sorry for the wall of text -- here's a link on how to play pinball in word 97, if you're into that kind of thing:

https://eeggs.com/items/763.html

(But if you attach that box to the net, someone might pop it, since Windows 98 or whatever is no longer receiving security updates, and Mark Zuckerberg and his tech bro cronies have the consent model of a frat boy -- if you don't opt out, they think they can do whatever they want.)