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...
3d pinball
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
Hey,
I just mooved from WinXP to Win7 with my software.
My software needs to have real time response to I/O so it makes busy-wait in one thread (wich has affinity to run on one CPU).
The result is 100% CPU on one of the cores and 0 CPU for others, in WinXP it worked just fine.
In win7 the...
