The REAL Story On Why Space Cadet Pinball Was Removed (ft. Windows on Itanium)
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as the detailed, entertaining history of why 3D Pinball vanished from Windows.
What it is
NCommander investigates why Space Cadet Pinball disappeared from Windows Vista, building on Raymond Chen's explanation about 64-bit incompatibility. He tests it on 64-bit Windows including Itanium and walks through the debugging.
Recommended by 4 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2021 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec registeredcorn · 2022-02 · on “The cats sitting on a fence in early builds of Windows 8”
If you have the time, I highly recommend checking out the NCommander's video talking about Space Cadet Pinball. [this video] 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.
Recommends nazgulsenpai · 2021-10 · on “SpaceCadetPinball – Decompilation of 3D Pinball for Windows”
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] [this video]
Recommends leeter · 2021-10 · on “SpaceCadetPinball – Decompilation of 3D Pinball for Windows”
Yes... [this video] Warning contains a youtuber bashing their head firmly against the pain of Itanium to test this.
Recommends Kwpolska · 2024-03 · on “The Format Dialog in Windows NT”
There were issues with Pinball on "Windows XP 64-bit Edition", or the Itanium version. A great video explaining this is [this video]