I’m not sure why I played so much Pinball on my Windows machine as a child. Nor am I sure why it was given so many different names, like Space Cadet 3D Pinball, 3D Pinball for Windows, Microsoft 3D Pinball, etc. What I do know, however, is it ran great on my old Windows NT 4.0 beige box, and now I’ve learned exactly why—the engineer who ported it over accidentally built a surprisingly resource-heavy game engine around it.
Enter Dave Plummer, an ex-Microsoft engineer whose other Windows contributions include Task Manager, native Zip file support, and Media Center, to name just a few (via The Register). Speaking on his YouTube channel, Dave’s Attic, Plummer revealed that when he ported the game to Windows NT from Windows 95, he wrote a whole new game engine around the original logic in order to handle the video rendering and sound.
“My game engine had a bug, in that it would draw frames as fast as it could” said Plummer. At the time, the game was being coded on a MIPS R4000 processor running at a mighty 200 MHz, which resulted in the game running at 60-90 fps, a speed Plummer judged as “plenty, for a game like that.”
“Fast forward a couple of years later, somebody notices that on multi-core machines, it’s using an entire core to play Pinball at all times,” he laughs. “It was still drawing as fast as it could, but it was now drawing at like, 5,000 frames per second, because machines were much much faster than they used to be.”
The bug was fixed by another ex-Microsoft engineer, Raymond Chen. Speaking on Plummer’s other YouTube channel, Dave’s Garage, Chen fondly remembers adding a frame rate limiter, thereby reigning the game in to a 100 fps maximum. “My proudest moment in Windows development,” Chen says, “was I fixed Pinball so you could kick off a build and play Pinball at the same time.”
Plummer categorises the mistake as the worst Windows bug he ever shipped, and although he laughs about it now, it seems Microsoft culture at the time was particularly adverse to brushing off mistakes: “If you had a bug that actually made it into the product and required work in a Service Pack, that was never a laughing matter. That was kind of a shameful thing.”
Still, no real harm done. I’d imagine the rise of multi-core processors required all kinds of fixes to integrate within existing codebases successfully, and it certainly seems like Plummer and his ex-colleagues remember the bug fondly.
And it must be said, part of me wants to run that early build on a modern multi-core monster like the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D, given that NT seems to play remarkably well with modern hardware. I’d like to imagine that the frame rate would break world records, although I’ve got a funny feeling I’d get that iconic Windows NT 4.0 error sound instead. Ah, the error messages of my youth. Perhaps it’s time to boot Pinball up once more for a game or three.
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