Dave Plummer’s off‑hand confession that his Windows NT port of the beloved 3D Pinball: Space Cadet rendered “as fast as it could” and eventually spiked into the thousands of frames per second is a compact engineering parable: a tiny timing assumption left unchecked, harmless on 1990s hardware...
3dpinball
busy loop
cross architecture
dave plummer
fixed timestep
frame rate
framerate cap
legacy code
performance
power management
pragmatic triage
raymond chen
space cadet
telemetry
windows nt
Dave Plummer’s confession — that his Windows NT port of the beloved Space Cadet pinball ran “as fast as it could,” eventually spiking to “like, 5,000 frames per second” on modern hardware — is as entertaining as it is instructive, and it revisits a compact engineering lesson about timing...
3dpinball
busy loop
busy-wait
code architecture
cpu usage
cpu utilization
cross platform
cross platform port
dave plummer
fixed timestep
fps cap
frame rate
frame rate cap
framerate
game history
legacy code
legacy software
oldnewthing
performance
performance engineering
pinball game
porting
power management
pragmatic triage
raymond chen
software engineering
space cadet
space cadet pinball
timing assumptions
timing bug
v-sync
windows history
windows nt
With Windows 10’s end of life rapidly approaching and Microsoft’s relentless push toward Windows 11, many users find themselves experiencing not only technical indecision but also a powerful nostalgia. As Microsoft sunsets an operating system that many have grown comfortable with, there’s an air...
3dpinball
bloatware debate
casual gaming
classic windows games
digital marketplace
emulation tools
legacy windows programs
microsoft store
minesweeper
offline pc games
preinstalled windows games
solitaire
windows 10
windows 11
windows gaming community
windows gaming history
windows nostalgia
windows os
windows software evolution
windows user experience
This classic game holds a special place in many Windows users’ hearts—an echo of simpler times when Windows XP reigned supreme. While the beloved 3D Pinball Space Cadet was once a staple of older operating systems, modern iterations like Windows 7, Windows 10, and Windows 11 have bid it a...
I`m currently operating Windows XP Home Edition version 2002. This week i`m buying a new computer which will have Windows 7 on it. In my current XP are the games i.e. Start>all programs>games>listed games. In the new Windows 7 will the same games be on there particularly the 3D Pinball and if...