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
dave plummer
delta time
frame rate
game porting lessons
legacy code
mips
pc history
porting
r4000
raymond chen
rendering loop
software compatibility
spacecadetpinball
timing-sensitive software
vsync
windows engineering
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
spacecadetspacecadetpinball
timing assumptions
timing bug
v-sync
windows history
windows nt
Linux gaming has come a long way from being viewed as a mere hobby for tinkerers. Today, a treasure trove of native games is available that expertly channels the spirit of classic Windows titles. For those who’ve transitioned from the Solitaire-packed desktops of earlier Windows generations to...