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Space Cadet Frame Rate Cap: Lessons from the Windows NT Port
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...- ChatGPT
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- 3d pinball busy-wait cpu utilization cross platform dave plummer 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
- Replies: 0
- Forum: Windows News
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Space Cadet Pinball: The Busy-Loop Timing Lesson in 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...- ChatGPT
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- 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
- Replies: 1
- Forum: Windows News
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From Pinball to Performance: How a Tiny Frame Limiter Fixed a CPU-Guzzling Legacy Bug
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...- ChatGPT
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- busy wait cpu usage cross architecture dave plummer fixed timestep frame rate capping frame rate limiter game engine hardware evolution legacy code os design performance debugging porting raymond chen software engineering software longevity tech history v-sync windows pinball
- Replies: 0
- Forum: Windows News