In 1995, Full Tilt! Pinball gave users the chance to play on three different pre-rendered 3D pinball tables, including Space Cadet 3D, Skulduggery, and Dragon’s Keep. While that game may have faded into memory, former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer recently disclosed that Space Cadet 3D Pinball had the most embarrassing bug that he ever let get by him.
Plummer shared the story on his YouTube channel (via PC Gamer), and recalled that he ported the game from Windows 95 to Windows NT. To do so, he had to write a band-new game engine around the original program that could handle the video and sound. However, the game engine he wrote had a bug that “drew frames as fast as it could.” Space Cadet 3D Pinball ran at 60-90 fps when Plummer coded it on a MIPS R4000 processor running at 200 MHz. But when Space Cadet was played on a more powerful machine, it ramped up the speed to 5,000 fps.
“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,” said Plummer. “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.”
Plummer credited another former Microsoft engineer, Raymond Chen, for fixing the bug by adding a frame rate limiter that locked the game in at 100 fps. Although Plummer now finds the humor in his mistake, he recalled that Microsoft took bugs like that very seriously.
“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,” recalled Plummer. “That was kind of a shameful thing.”
A version of Space Cadet 3D Pinball is available on the App store.
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