Dave Plummer’s confession that his port of 3D Pinball for Windows — the Space Cadet table so many of us grew up with — once drew frames “as fast as it could” and reportedly hit roughly 5,000 FPS on newer hardware has resurfaced a powerful, funny and instructive moment in Windows engineering...
5000 fps
64-bit port
cpu utilization
cross architecture
daveplummer
delta time
frame rate
game porting lessons
legacy code
mips
pc history
porting
r4000
raymond chen
rendering loop
software compatibility
space cadet pinball
timing-sensitive software
vsync
windows engineering
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...
3d pinball
busy-wait
cpu utilization
cross platform
daveplummer
fixed timestep
frame rate cap
framerate
game history
legacy code
performance
porting
power management
pragmatic triage
raymond chen
software engineering
space cadet
timing bug
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...
3d pinball
busy loop
busy-wait
code architecture
cpu usage
cpu utilization
cross platform
cross platform port
daveplummer
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
Dave Plummer’s confession that the worst bug he ever shipped was tied to the beloved Windows pack‑in game Pinball is more than a nostalgic anecdote — it’s a compact lesson in resource management, legacy code risk, and the kind of tiny design decisions that can balloon into systemic problems as...