Windows Vista woes killed MS Pinball
Pinball, the popular game shipped with desktop versions of Windows from 32-bit Windows 95 to XP, didn’t make it into Windows Vista because Microsoft just didn’t have the time to port its code into a 64-bit version. So says Raymond Chen, author of MSDN Blog The Old New Thing and a long-time member of the Windows Development team …
This topic is closed for new posts.
win 95
"...32-bit Windows 95 to XP..."
Pretty sure pinball was only in NT versions of windows
Re: win 95
It was in the Plus... pack, I seem to recall - along with IE!
Re: win 95
I don't remember seeing it installed on many machines.
I never played it either.
Microsoft killed InkBall in Windows 7, it was available on Vista
I am still waiting for an official explanation as to why that happened.
I don't care.
Windows versions went down hill when they stopped supplying Tetris as part of the Operating System.
Oooh... a game as part of the OS? Hmmm... :)
Re: I don't care.
Oooh... a game as part of the OS? Hmmm... :)
I recall reading somewhere -- might have been Microsoft Systems Journal -- that Bill Gates himself commissioned the minesweeper game (which is effectively unplayable without a mouse) to encourage users to become accustomed to using the mouse and so wean them off the keyboard for everyday tasks.
Not one of his stupider moves, IMHO.
Now, of course -- with surface -- Microsoft is trying to make us give up the mouse in favour of touch and the keyboard. I wish they'd make up their minds and stick to it!
Re: I don't care.
I heard the same thing about Solitar, getting the user to click and drag the cards around was a good start for some with poor hand/eye coordination.
MS developers port millions of lines of code? Strange. I usually just update a few type definitions and give it a good testing.
We took the C++ source for a multi-file system data recovery suite from DOS to Win16 then to Win32. From what I remember it took two or three days and most of the source didn't change. Of course the underlying file system structures weren't going to change and we'd been sensible and used fix bit-width types for the data structures. But it was a pretty trivial exercise from what I remember. The big ticket item was implementing an MFC based equivalent of the Turbo Vision UI and allowing both to build from the same source. That shouldn't be an issue going from Win32 to Win64.
Ah yes but..
Are you sticking strictly to documented APIs on your code or are you using loads of undocumented APIs and other tweaks, workarounds or other strange hacks?
Not of course that we would ever expect MS to do the latter
Re: Ah yes but..
I wouldn't expect Microsoft to do it either. I actually had access to the NT and Windows builds in the mid-90s and saw no evidence of this rumoured cheating the conspiracy theorists love to imagine.
@AndrueC
Games code from that era could well have been full of all kinds of horrible low-level tricks which would actually need modifying for 64-bit compilation...
@AndrueC
That's what I thought. And to judge from the article, that's what the team at Microsoft thought, too. But, as it says, the resulting build had broken collision detection.
Was going to read the article but the IBM background and flashing banners put me off.
Open source to the rescue
I dare them to open source it, I bet that collision detector would be fixed in no time at all by a coder with some talent.
Windows has built-in games?
And people play them? Seriously?
Given the option of Solitaire or something from my Steam collection....Steam wins.
Re: Windows has built-in games?
Wow, quite a surprising level of butthurt over an OS-included pinball game...
Step 1. Go to GoG.com
Step 2. Register. Receive Beneath a Steel Sky/Duke Nukem 3D/Ultima IV for free.
Step 3. Buy the Independence War games for $3.
Step 4. Get over yourself.
Of course they don't understand the code!
Space Cadet Pinball was originally written by Cinematronics as part of a pinball games package. Microsoft probably bought out the right to that particular minigame along with it's source code, and the code is most likely poorly documented.
A quick search on Google will have Wikipedia and several other sites will tell you that B)
After Windows 8, was Vista's bad reputation REALLY deserved?
Thinking back to the amount of hate landed on Windows Vista, I am finding it increasingly difficult to fathom all the hate iHipsters landed on Windows Vista back in the day. Windows 8, and even Windows XP upon launch, is much worse.
Vista simply introduced the same driver model that Windows uses today, with time taken for component manufacturers to supply proper drivers. I actually find the default user interface in Windows Vista to be superior to that of Windows 7 (In Windows 7 hated this childish Mac-inspired trend of encouraging users to clutter the bottom of their screens with a large bar of 30 useless icons which have no use whatsoever to the current task being performed other than wasting space and adding distraction).
Yet, somehow the hipsters seem to love Windows 8 because it adds a lot of pointless new shiny; the fact that it drives most who have to actually use it for something useful insane matters not one iota to the hipsters.
The moral of the story: ignore everything a hipster says, especially if wearing a black turtleneck.
Re: After Windows 8, was Vista's bad reputation REALLY deserved?
Did you actually use Vista for any length of time? I am a very happy MS camper - but even I admit Vista was a turd. Any major OS release which is significantly slower than the previous version despite a RAM upgrade is obviously not going to be popular.
An OS should be transparent, invisible. I use any OS because it enables me to use my applications. Vista meant that all of the stuff that I needed to do my work (my apps) ran a little bit slower and a little more judery. No thanks - I switched back to XP.
> Vista simply introduced the same driver model that Windows uses today, with time taken for component manufacturers to supply proper drivers.
Yes but they crammed it down people's throats, removing the option to buy XP with most new PCs, and at the time it simply was not ready. Their GPU "accelerated" UI was slower than the not-GPU accelerated XP and it needed far more RAM because of their composition model using the GPU. It took them until Win 7 to fix that one - and Win 7 is actually pretty nice.
Re: After Windows 8, was Vista's bad reputation REALLY deserved?
Hmmmm it all depends really.
My experience of Vista from day one was as follows -
Installed on a dual core machine with 2GB of ram with a clean bloatware free build it ran just fine. I never had any problems with the two Vista machines I ran (with OEM copies of Vista 64bit) and in fact the best version IMO was Home Basic as it did all you wanted with less stuff thrown in.
However, if it was installed by Dell/Toshiba/Fujitsu/Asus/Acer/HP etc. etc. with the general lack of attention they give, the dodgy pre-release drivers and masses of bloatware that was designed to work with XP then you got into trouble. That and the low ram and single cores they were pushing out at the time.
I get these old Vista machines in from time to time to service and they are truly awful disk thrashing machines. But I back up the user data and then install a clean fresh build of Vista with all the service packs and latest drivers and it runs as sweet as a nut. Basically as good as 7 does.
Customers are amazed when I hand them back.
The problems with Vista were it needed another couple of months polishing from MS.
The Hardware manufacturers needed to have developed proper drivers (32 and 64bit) for it. They had plenty of warning but had got lazy over XP lasting so long before Vista.
The PC/Laptop sellers skimped on the specs and loaded up the wrong bloatware (if there is such a thing as right bloatware).
A clean fresh install of Vista works fine.
Re: After Windows 8, was Vista's bad reputation REALLY deserved?
Re Bad Rep:
I didn't use Vista Pro, but Home Premium wouldn't allow you to turn off the 'feature' that automatically restarted the machine after downloading updates. This meant that you couldn't leave it running, say, some rendering or downloading, and be guaranteed to find everything running when you got back. Okay, I can see the argument for getting security updates installed when MS realised that many users weren't restarting their machines for weeks- but MS's solution would loose people any unsaved documents. (Yeah, I know, but...)
The UAC was fairly obtrusive, too.
Other than that, I found Vista stable (when attended!) and usable, though it was on a new machine. I was a bit miffed that I apparently didn't have the RAM to do things I had done on an older machine, though.
I think a lot of the upset over Vista was over misleading hardware requirements re existing machines, which understandably annoyed businesses, and I remember something about longer start-up times, too.
Ah well.
hidden from addd remove programs
What got me about the pinball was why was it hidden from add/remove programs in XP?
Because of this I always removed it (edit sysoc.inf) from customers computers, thinking it was some sort of MS spyware.
.. and Gates had the nerve to call Linux 'Pacman'
I hope you boys realise
That you just cost me half the afternoon digging out that rave from the past. Still Captain level and 12 million points is my second best ever score on this box, even though I expect serious games players will be sniggering to themselves at that...
I don't see why they had a problem...
...given that Vista was supposed to be able to run 32-bit code. Why not just ship the 32-bit version?
Mind you, I've switched lots of code to 64-bit just be recompiling with the correct compiler options. If you've written the code correctly, and have a decent environment, it should just work. But that was on Unix/Linux.
Win code quality
The NT kernel itself is well written and has a lot of advanced features which aren't in unix. Most have their ancestry in VMS.
The multitude of issues virtually all arise from poor coding in the UI, associated libraries and applications - which is the "windows" part of the OS.
As long as there's no UI running, windows servers are remarkably stable. Of course you can't do much with them either but that's just the way it goes.
This topic is closed for new posts.
