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Full Tilt! Pinball (codenamed Maelstrom), is a pinball simulation game written by Cinematronics and distributed by Maxis, for Windows 3.1x, 95, and for Mac OS 7 and higher.[1] It was released in 1995. It includes three Pinball tables, "Space Cadet" (Space themed), "Skullduggery" (Pirate themed), and "Dragon's Keep" (Medieval themed). A port of the "Space Cadet" table was included first in the Microsoft Plus! extension for Windows 95, under the name 3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet. The manual for Full Tilt! Pinball even mention this.[1] The version of the table included in Plus! later became a feature in Windows NT 4.0 and later (excluding 98) and was removed in Windows Vista build 5098.[2] The Plus! edition was created, as Cinematronics/Maxis licensed the code for the Space Cadet table to Microsoft to create a separate Space Cadet version as part of the Plus! Pack promotion to gain exposure for the two companies.[3]
Component of Microsoft Windows | |
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![]() Pinball on Microsoft Plus! 95 build 310 | |
Introduced in | Microsoft Plus! 95 |
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Last included in | Windows Vista build 5048 |
Replaced by | Chess Titans (supposed) |
The Microsoft release has several differences:
INTRO.AVI
), that shows the Cinematronics and Full Tilt! logo. Microsoft's version simply uses an image that is a resource in the executable as a splash screen.PINBALL.MID
) that is the standard theme looped over 8 minutes. PINBALL2.MID
is included with every copy, but is a data file.Full Tilt! Pinball was originally written in "significant amounts of x86 assembly language". It was implied that Microsoft managed to create native ports of 3D Pinball for Windows on other platforms (DEC Alpha, ARC MIPS, PReP PowerPC), that they successfully ported it to a cross-compilable language such as C,[7] which was finally confirmed by retired Windows NT developer Dave Plummer in August 2021, the programmer who built such cross-platform builds.[8]
Microsoft claimed it did not include the program in Windows Vista due to them being unable to successfully create a 64-bit version (reasons cited including Microsoft developers having trouble with rounding floating point integers that were used in the collision detection engine[2] during development with the original version of the game as well as problems with floating point math and the collision detection,[7]), however these problems appear to mostly pertain to the original release of Windows XP 64-Bit Edition for Itanium processors, as a native 64-bit version of Pinball for both Itanium and x64 systems was shipped with both Version 2003 of the 64-Bit Edition and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, respectively.[9] It is possible that Raymond Chen's article was referring to Itanium-related porting issues and confused it with Windows Vista-related development, though. The game, in both its x86 and x64 forms; does remain playable on later versions of Windows when the files are carried over (albeit with some minor graphical issues), which is also present on the final development build bundling it, build 5048.
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