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. The tables on which we can play are: Baffle Ball from 1931. Microsoft Pinball Arcade is seven historic filpper tables produced by Gottlieb. Heck, we couldn’t even find the collision detector! Microsoft Pinball Arcade is an arcade game released in 1998 by Microsoft. 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. This required updating and writing millions of lines of code to support the new architecture, and some older programs were more difficult to work with than others: Although Microsoft released a 64-bit version of Windows XP, it wasn’t until Vista, and especially Windows 7, that 64-bit Windows hit the mainstream. As explained in a 2012 MSDN blog post by Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen, the real reason for the loss of Windows Pinball was the switch from a 32-bit to a 64-bit architecture.
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