3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet

Game: 3D Pinball for Windows - Space Cadet (Windows, 1995)

A decompilation of 3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet, the pinball game that came with Windows, turned into a native port. It starts from Windows XP’s pinball.exe, with its public PDB, and the 32-bit CADET.EXE from Full Tilt! Pinball: every function was decompiled with Ghidra and IDA, and the C pseudocode was turned into compilable C++. Version 2 replaced the Windows dependencies with SDL2, SDL2_mixer, and Dear ImGui, and runs on Windows, Linux, and macOS; it’s also on Flathub and Homebrew, and other authors have ported it to Switch, Vita, Wii, 3DS, and more. It adds a resizable window with scaled graphics, integer scaling, the high-resolution sprites from the Full Tilt data, gamepad support, and an option to switch between the two versions’ data. As for the 64-bit bug that killed the game (the ball stopped colliding), its author says they never found it: the decompiled code worked in 64-bit on the first try. Version 2.1.0 (October 16, 2023) focused on Full Tilt compatibility (collisions, multiball, three MIDI tracks) and added a hardware-accelerated ImGui renderer and experimental stereo sound; there have been no new commits since August 2024.

You needThe files from your own copy of 3D Pinball for Windows (the folder with PINBALL.DAT and its other files, from Windows XP for example) or of Full Tilt! Pinball, whose demo also works. Plus Windows (32- or 64-bit, XP included), macOS, or Linux (on Flathub, as distro packages, or built from source).

How it gets to PC

Port of a decompilation

Console

Microsoft Windows

Original studio

Cinematronics

Year

1995

Author

k4zmu2a

Stars

4.8k

Last activity

2024-08-21 · 2 years ago

Latest version

Release_2.1.0 · 2023-10-16

License

MIT

Language

C++