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If you have the time, I highly recommend checking out the NCommander's video talking about Space Cadet Pinball. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EPTfOTC4Jw

He references the same blog, and goes into some pretty incredible detail about the history of what happened to pinball coming pre-installed on Windows.

Yes... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EPTfOTC4Jw

Warning contains a youtuber bashing their head firmly against the pain of Itanium to test this.

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

I learned a lot about 3D Pinball recently on this video [0]. It's specifically about the 64bit versions of 3D Pinball (or the lack thereof) and the reasons why. Part of that is debugging which relates to this.

[0] https://youtu.be/3EPTfOTC4Jw

⬐ 22c

Dave Plummer, the programmer who ported Space Cadet pinball to ship with Windows, also recently did a video on this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThxdvEajK8g

⬐ kgliner

Plummer is flat out wrong that his port enabled our game to ship with Windows -- we built it for Windows (and for Microsoft) from the start. He didn't enter the picture until we were already shipping with the popular Microsoft Plus Pack (which put us on about 25% of all Windows machines). Honestly, I'd never heard of Plummer until a few years ago when a journalist asked about him.

Plummer's only role, near as I can tell, was to get it working on later Windows operating systems that were 32 bit (or certain 32 bit variants), which likely extended the shipping life of the game (so, not Windows 95 or Windows 98, but the others that followed). Microsoft actually had the option in our original deal to ship with the OS when Win 95 launched and chose the Plus Pack instead.

   Kevin

⬐ 22c

Interesting insight but I think you're both "right". If I'm reading you correctly and understanding Dave correctly, the game was made for running in 16-bit mode on Windows. According to Dave, Microsoft did not want to ship any applications with their "flagship" 32-bit OS that were not able to run natively in 32-bit.

This, according to Dave, is also the reason you don't see Pinball shipped on the newer "64-bit" versions of Windows, despite the 32-bit version running just fine on 64-bit Windows.

⬐ Fudgel

Great video!

⬐ bombcar

Long story short - it works on x64, Raymond's bug can be created easily, but apparently was fixed by someone else at some point, and then appears to have been cut because it graphically doesn't match "Vista" at a later point.

So it was "cut" from Itanium because of floating point glitches, was later fixed and put back in to x64, but then removed because it looked out of place.

⬐ sorcix

Or just read the original article at https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121218-00/?p=58...

⬐ jowsie

This video isn't a rehashing of that article, it's the "real" story behind why it was removed. Read the video description at least if you're not willing to sit through the 30 minute video.

⬐ sidlls

This isn't a piece of film art, it's informational. The audience shouldn't have to sit through a 30 minute video to get 5 minutes worth of content.

⬐ adenozine

The incentives to create this sort of content are imo the most toxic aspect of YouTube.

⬐ jowsie

It's entertainment, which is arguably film art, it just happens to also be a source of information. If you don't want to watch it, no one is forcing you to do so.

As I said, most of the information is right there in the video description.

⬐ bombcar

The missing piece is that he got it to run on Vista x64, but it is low resolution and looks out of place, which he suspects is why it got axed.

⬐ optimiz3

The video details a very thorough investigation and explores various ways Chen's blog post could have been truthy.

There's value in seeing the process that goes into debunking the official "party" line.

⬐ phendrenad2

I have long suspected that Raymond Chen doesn't really exist, and the blog is an inside joke among Microsofters to see who can revise history the most.

⬐ drewcoo

Maybe people who identify as "Microsofters" are part of a Stanislaw Lem-like literary conspiracy[1] named RaymondC.

I will see that and raise you a "Microsofters don't exist."[2]

[1] https://culture.pl/en/article/philip-k-dick-stanislaw-lem-is...

[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Microsoftie

⬐ dsego

Dave Plummer ported the game for Win XP, and he made an interesting yt video about it:

Windows 11 Pinball by the original Windows XP programmer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThxdvEajK8g

⬐ twoodfin

What a fun rabbit hole to tumble down!

Whenever the Itanium vs. AMD64 history comes up, I wonder what Intel’s roadmap for “consumer” IA64 looked like before AMD’s success made it obsolete.

Retellings like this imply Intel fully intended to replace x86 with Itanium, but I’ve never seen a hint as to how they saw that playing out.

⬐ richard_todd

Itanium had x86 emulation in hardware, so I think the model was to transition via emulation. But, as far as I know, it wasn’t very performant, and then AMD nailed the coffin shut a few years later with their 64-but architecture.

⬐ bombcar

I suspect they saw it happening as we now see it happening for Apple on Mac - i64 would rule the servers and high-end hardware while people used x32 on "personal" machines until such time as i64 was cheap enough and fast enough to emulate x32 for home machines. I believe it was even touted as being able to do that - and the major vendors would recompile pretty quickly at that point.

If only they had been able to convince Microsoft to not release for AMD64 the world might have been extremely different ...

⬐ ionwake

This was really interesting and I enjoyed the whole video thank you not sure what others are complaining about

⬐ propter_hoc

Well, that was a great clickbait headline and intro, but ultimately I spent 30 minutes watching this guy installing ten beta builds of Windows to come up with basically nothing.

Tl;dw: they did manage to port Pinball, so the MS blog isn't telling the full story. However, they cut it anyways.

Why? He doesn't know, so the answer to the question posed by the clickbait headline is 'I don't know', but he speculates that the shift to higher resolution screens would have meant the VGA graphics of Pinball needed to be redone.

⬐ throwthere

Thanks I read the description it said Pretty much the same thing. The description ended with a little teaser that made me think thered be more information in the video. I think it’s really weird that there actually wasn’t more information. You saved me half an hour.

⬐ ChrisSD

From the original blog post, it seems there was a problem with collision detection on the Windows XP 64 bit build they were testing. They didn't have much time to investigate the issue so they dropped it.

Maybe the issue was fixed later or maybe an unrelated change in 64 bit Windows fixed it. Either way it sounds like the decision had already been made and wasn't revisited.

⬐ dsego

Dave Plummer explains it in his video https://youtu.be/ThxdvEajK8g

⬐ marcan_42

He's wrong about Pinball never being fixed for 64-bit and only working as a 32-bit app though. The OP video demonstrated that 64-bit versions exist and work fine.

⬐ imglorp

My other tl;dw was there are many finely granular versions of Windows that were (are still?) very sensitive to finely granular processor versions.

⬐ propter_hoc

Yeah, I was actually pretty surprised to see that it was possible to get access to all these obscure builds.

⬐ jchw

Wouldn’t call it clickbait; the question goes without getting a fully satisfying, final answer, but it’s still the best exploration of the topic I’ve seen. Far from what I would call “clickbait.”

⬐ LaundroMat

Almost every headline that starts with Why is clickbait in my book. I want the headline to summarize the article/video (i.e. the answer), and if I'm interested in learning more details I'll read the article or watch the video.

⬐ jchw

That is an extremely wide net to cast as “clickbait”; the term was coined to describe Buzzfeed-style content wherein the subject matter itself is obscured but the headline is made to be attention grabbing, like “Doctors don’t want you to know this one weird trick…” or perhaps worse, an article where the headline suggests one thing but the actual story is essentially the opposite.

In fact, I’d even go as far as to say this video isn’t burying the lede, either, because it is an exploratory video that goes through a progression to the conclusion. Therefore it is not burying the lede anymore than it would be “burying the lede” for a documentary to progress chronologically.

And on top of that, while there’s nothing wrong with putting the key information in the title, an important component of being a successful content creator in any genre is in fact, coming up with engaging titles. “Why Pinball was removed” is a superior title to “Pinball was probably removed from Vista when they revamped the Windows Games” even though the latter is more information-dense.

In my opinion the worst legitimate criticism that you can level is that the answer is not as definitive as one would hope. But I don’t think what you are leveling is all that fair; it feels like criticism against the genre of video more than the actual content itself.

It wouldn’t be hurt by a tl;dw, but I’d rather follow the author to the conclusion myself, because I find the subject interesting, found the exploration interesting, and then I could understand the reasoning for the answer. If you didn’t enjoy the process that the video went through, I can only say that I would assert that you’re likely not in the target audience for that particular subset of video content and therefore it wouldn’t make sense to optimize it for you.