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...
busy loop
busy-wait
cpu usage
cross platform port
cross-platform
dave plummer
fixed timestep
fps cap
frame rate
gaming history
legacy code
legacy systems
old new thing
performance
performance engineering
pinball
porting
power management
pragmatic triage
raymond chen
software architecture
software development
space cadet
space cadet pinball
timing assumptions
timingbug
vsync
windows history
windows nt
