The attention to detail and obvious forethought of the design elevates this package from a "nice time waster" to being a very worthwhile game.
System Requirementsįor Win 95: 486 DX or above, 8 MB RAM, 20 MB hard drive space for complete installation, 2X CD-ROM drive, 256 color SVGA monitor which supports 640 x 480 mode, supports most Windows compatible sound cardsįor Windows 3.1: 486 DX or above, 20 MB hard drive space for complete installation, 8 MB RAM, 2X CD-ROM drive, 256 color SVGA monitor which supports 640 x 480 mode, supports most Windows compatible sound cards Bottom LineĪ wonderful example of "how it’s done." Every aspect of the game, from documentation to design, is well-crafted, balanced, and just generally cool. Both of these are very nice touches, indicative of the kind of attention devoted to the entire game. Also, there’s a section in the back devoted both to the history of pinball and looking ahead to its future. Not only are all the controls thoroughly explained, and the sound and video issues explored in depth, but there’s a considerable amount of space dedicated to playing tips, like aiming the ball, nudging the table and so on. For the most part, you don't even have to be able to read to play.
You can, in Win 95 at least, play full screen or in a window (although the tables look a little scrunched with the latter), and the game doesn’t suck your system resources away, so it tucks itself nicely away on the start bar if need be. Player controls, like the flippers and tilt buttons, are all available for the changing. The sounds and music are on/off optional, individually. The screen can be adjusted for five different levels of brightness. If you want the source code, you have to go ask them.More than you could ever really need.
Update: Hey everybody asking that the source code be released: The source code was licensed from another company. It was the location of the one Windows XP feature I am most proud of. If it makes you feel better, I am saddened by this as much as you are. We just made the executive decision right there to drop Pinball from the product. 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. Is this because of some kind of malware if so how can i fix it. Play Pinball Star for Windows today If you like Pin ball, Bubble Star, Zulu Star, skee ball, basketball, air hockey, bowling, or any other classic arcade games, you will love Pinball Star Free+. Engage your hyperdrive, and blast into this classic game. So i end up back at my desktop even though i clicked on the game. Now you can re-live the experience on your new Windows devices. Heck, we couldn’t even find the collision detector! the 3d pinball game wont work i click on the game and it shows the black screen that says 3d pinball than just goes away and doesnt start. Two of us tried to debug the program to figure out what was going on, but given that this was code written several years earlier by an outside company, and that nobody at Microsoft ever understood how the code worked (much less still understood it), and that most of the code was completely uncommented, we simply couldn’t figure out why the collision detector was not working. In particular, when you started the game, the ball would be delivered to the launcher, and then it would slowly fall towards the bottom of the screen, through the plunger, and out the bottom of the table. The 64-bit version of Pinball had a pretty nasty bug where the ball would simply pass through other objects like a ghost. But one of the programs that ran into trouble was Pinball. One of the things I did in Windows XP was port several millions of lines of code from 32-bit to 64-bit Windows so that we could ship Windows XP 64-bit Edition. There is apparently speculation that this was done for legal reasons. Windows XP was the last client version of Windows to include the Pinball game that had been part of Windows since Windows 95.