if you used windows throughout the NUMBER_TOKENs or early NUMBER_TOKENs then these should be familiar sights and sounds they are of course the welcoming chimes of space cadet pinball a game that shipped as part of the base system for over NUMBER_TOKEN years before being removed with windows vista in NUMBER_TOKEN the closest anyone got to an explanation as to why this beloved game was removed was when microsoft insider raymond chen wrote a blog post about it that set the record straight specifically he states the game was removed due to compatibility issues with NUMBER_TOKEN-bit processors and that he had spent many hours trying to fix the game before giving it up as a lost cause on the surface this might make sense but what if i were to tell you that this wasn't the truth in fact what if i were to tell you that i have multiple versions of a NUMBER_TOKEN-bit pinball game that work well get ready because this is your host end commander and today we're going to chart the final days of space cadet pinball and trace the chain of events that led to its removal our journey will take us from the classic windows xp desktop to intel's failed titanium architecture the longhorn project and so much more so i recommend you all get comfortable and let's wind it back to where i start which was with a video posted by michael mjd a few weeks ago if you're not familiar with his channel michael mjd did a video demoing a pre-release version of windows xp xNUMBER_TOKEN during his exploration he showed pinball running just fine which immediately got my attention and prompted me to start my own investigation the easiest thing to do was see if pinball had persisted to the final release of windows xp xNUMBER_TOKEN after completing the installation process i can say yes it did and it's even listed in the games folder i played a few test rounds and it seems to be just fine or well mostly fine if we look closely there's some graphical corruption several lights are misaligned the left flipper is clipped while the right flipper has gained an outline at the same time the ball plunger appears to be a bit camera shy that being said the game appears to play just fine still this does mean that there was a NUMBER_TOKEN-bit version of pinball and while not perfect it's obviously playable just to confirm i did actually load this version of pinball into the reverse engineering tool gridra and confirm that yes it is a native NUMBER_TOKEN-bit version through and through since this is a good time to bring this up microsoft actually shipped what are known as symbol files in their debug kits for almost every version of pinball i examined which drastically aided my investigations it's also why i have function names both here and in windybug still with a native NUMBER_TOKEN-bit pinball on hand it would seem that raymond chen's post is wrong or well so it would seem let's actually read the relevant post together in it raymond writes one of the things i did in windows xp was port several million lines of code from NUMBER_TOKEN-bit to NUMBER_TOKEN-bit windows so we could ship windows xp NUMBER_TOKEN-bit edition the NUMBER_TOKEN-bit version of pinball had a pretty nasty bug where the ball would simply pass through other objects like a ghost in particular when you started the game the ball
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