The bug lore came from Raymond Chen's blog post [1]

[1] Why was Pinball removed from Windows Vista? https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121218-00/?p=58...

This comment made me chuckle and also a bit sad:

> [...] we simply couldn’t figure out why the collision detector was not working. Heck, we couldn’t even find the collision detector!

And the continuation is:

"We had several million lines of code still to port, so we couldn’t afford to spend days studying the code trying to figure out what obscure floating point rounding error was causing collision detection to fail."

I'd say Ray is right, not lacking the skill, but lacking the time

To be clear I was sad about the lack of comments in the original code. It shouldn't be that hard to find where the collision detection occurs.

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'.

It's nice to be able to point to this line: https://github.com/k4zmu2a/SpaceCadetPinball/blob/5947727f80...

And, while it is true that the code is sparsely commented, the geometry code that computes ray intersections is commented.

To be fair it's a huge undertaking to port any code of that size to 64 bits, be it fully commented or not. He probably remembers it vaguely and it might be a different function they had problems finding the exact location in the source code.

I'm curious, didn't they just call you or Danny (I believe that's Danny Thorpe, who is currently working for Microsoft) for assistance?

Ray wasn't about only to find the collision, but porting or not the game, meaning going through entire uncommented code of the game. And he said they made the executive decision not to port it.

There's a documentary about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EPTfOTC4Jw

I unpacked pinball from 64-bit windows xp cd, played it and the only bug I see is that the launcher isn't well visible.

It is incredible that even in 2021 people still parrot Chen's original _WRONG_ post about Pinball not being available in x64 Windows. We already even mentioned that in the original entry of his blog before the comments were removed.

Tens of "YouTube videos" appear in this thread and all of them simply parrot the same statement from Chen and not a single one of them even bothers to actually try Windows XP x64 edition and check whether Pinball is there not. Again only in some comments people seem to realize 'hey, you guys may be wrong .. there is a x64 pinball here after all, at least'.

I guess it's a sad reflection of our society.

I just looked in wikipedia, where it says xp had a working amd64 version.

Someone edited that in a couple weeks ago. (And cites a "Youtube video" as source. Sigh. )

I pirated (sorry) the Windows version of Space Cadet Pinball from some big torrent tracker (TBP, Demonoid?)some time after that blog post was put up and it worked on Windows 7. Last time I saw this story making the rounds, around 2017, I checked to see if it still worked on Windows 10 and to my surprise, it did. I don't know what sort of unofficial patch was applied if any, but it has been working on 64 bit windows for nearly a decade from what I can tell.

So there are various Youtubes about this... but it was 'Windows XP 64bit-Edition' (yes 'Edition' is part of the name. This specifically refers to IA-64 and not AMD64. There are rendering issues on the AMD64 versions but the IA-64 version doesn't work. Windows XP 64bit (non-edition) that was on AMD64 actually did ship with 3d pinball, albeit with some rendering issues. Best guess is that it was later removed in vista because it didn't fit the shiny new games theme that existed then. Raymond was giving his view of his part of the port to IA-64.

So, Microsoft had an agreement with Intel that Itanium version will be no worse than amd64 version, so they couldn't release pinball only for amd64 version?

They did release it for the windows XP 64bit editions for AMD64. So no it was definitely released, it has rendering issues but it is there and works AFAIK. As best I can tell it was removed because it didn't fit vista's aesthetic not that they couldn't get it to work.

Because if MS had that agreement... almost nothing would have been released on AMD64 as very little actually made it to IA-64 or was supported there realistically.

Windows for AMD64 is called x64 Edition, it also includes "Edition" on the name. Windows for IA64 is called 64-bit Edition.

Because Microsoft couldn't make it more confusing... lol

They could not really help it. It was not that clear these days what would exactly succeed x86 as the mainstream 64-bit architecture.

Makes me wonder why they removed Hearts from Windows 8

Probably the same collision detector issue⸮