Why Microsoft removed Pinball? Bashny.Net

One of the developers of Microsoft explained why the great game Pinball is not included in Windows Vista. It was rumored that it was done for legal reasons. But no, purely technical reasons. It turns out, Pinball just could not port the 64-bit platform.

During the development of Windows Vista had to port to 64-bit architecture, millions of lines of code, including the establishment 20 years ago, third-party developers. Sometimes there are problems. With Pinball there a specific problem: the ball does not bounce from obstacles and passed through them.

From the very beginning of the game, when the ball was fed to the spring-loaded launcher, he just slowly passed through it and disappeared. That is, the game ends very quickly.





"Two of us tried to debug the program and find out the reason, but this code was written several years before the company, and no one at Microsoft has never understood how it works (even fewer still understand it), and most of the code was completely without comments. Therefore, we simply could not understand why the collision detector is not working. Hell, we could not even find a collision detector!

More needed to port a few million lines of code, so that we could not afford to spend a few days to find a place to hide any error rounding floating point, because of which the collision detection is not working. We just took a resolute decision to exclude from the product Pinball.
via habrahabr

Source: