Play Store 3D Pinball Space Cadet Download
From the article:
If you grew up in the Windows XP era, than you probably spent hours playing its iconic free game, “3D Pinball Space Cadet.” Now, “Space Cadet” pinball has been ported to Android, and it’s completely free.
One of the many things that Windows XP will be remembered for is the pinball game that essentially everyone who ever used the operating system played at some point or another. The game has been immortalized many times, and now it’s available on Android.
Developer Kyle Sylvertre used a decompiled version of Space Cadet Pinball from k4zmu2a on GitHub to bring the game to the Google Play Store for Android users. The game is optimized for touchscreens with the left and right sides of the display acting as the triggers, and you can also tap the far right side to use the ball launcher. The game runs in portrait mode, supports 18 languages, integrates with Google Play Games for a leaderboard, and is less than 5MB in size.
And it’s all completely free too.
There are no ads or in-app purchases here, as the developer “just wanted to see it on Android with a Google Play leaderboard.” On that note, cheats are disabled to keep the integrity of that leaderboard, but the developer hints that cheats might come back with an option to turn off the leaderboard.
In any case, it’s a nice hit of nostalgia. Drop your high score in the comments below.
The GitHub version still has the cheats intact.
What are cheats? Tilting the table?
Extra balls, multipliers, God mode(although that’s mostly broken on Android)
They were in the original game as cheat codes you typed in. GitHub Android version just added buttons for them in the settings.
It seems like the reason that cheats were removed is because of public leaderboards
Makes sense, but personally I don’t care about leader boards, so I’d rather have the functionality in tact.
Couldn’t you make it so that cheats are working but just disqualify you from leaderboards?
It seems like the developer might do that, but I imagine we can’t have any guarantees from a free and ad-free app that aren’t given
Which GitHub version?
Windows XP era? Excuse me? It goes all the way back to Windows 95. The original game by Maxis is even older.
It was only in some kind of dlc pack (what?) for windows. The first real os it was included in was xp. I thought we all agreed not to talk about windows me
It was also Windows 98.
hm. Our first computer has windows 98 and it definitely didn’t have it
That’s where I remember it from.
This makes me feel very old.
Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95. And it wasn’t “DLC” because it was a physical disc. We need to bring back the term “expansion pack” to avoid ambiguity.
I don’t think disc-based distribution of software is coming back in the foreseeable future
Good point. “Downloadable Content” is therefore a bit redundant, is it not? (also “expansion pack” sounds exciting, and “downloadable content” sounds like corpo slop, as the kids say these days)
Be warned, there’s an ad supported version under a very similar name in the PlayStore. It’s worse in every way and has some permissions that it shouldn’t be asking for.
I think that game was actually supposed to be a demo for a bigger pinball game right?
Iirc was a 3 pack pinball game
Nah, it was an old maxis game, part of full tilt pinball, Dave brought it over for all of us to enjoy
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ThxdvEajK8g&pp=ygUVRGF2ZSdzIGdhcmFnZSBwaW5iYWxs
He has done a decent amount of vids on the game if you look through his channel
Other platforms you can run it on:
- Linux
- Windows
- MacOS
- PS Vita
- Nintendo Switch
- webOS TV
- Nintendo Wii
- Nintendo 3DS
- Nintendo DS
- Nintendo Wii U
- PlayStation 2
- Sega Dreamcast
- MorphOS
- AmigaOS 4
For Linux folks, it’s also available on FlatHub.
I’ve installed it on my steam deck and mapped the triggers to the left and right… uh… flappy things?
It works really well, and whenever people see it they’re like whoaaaaa I remember that!!
It was great to see that after all these years, and countless hours playing it, I still absolutely suck at it.
I wasted a lot of time at work playing that back in the late 90s. Downloaded.
Yo this is T I G H T
How can you do this to me?! I have a family, bro! Now nothing will get done!
No tilt?
The Fexed Github project has tilt controls (and better gravity sim if I’m not trippin’, I know one of the projects had gravity issues and the play store version feels too floaty)
Yes tilt
I want a FOSS version of Plants vs Zombies to exist
Really all of the classic Pop Cap games, like peggle and bejeweled. Before they were bastardized.
Well that was an instant yes please
It’s not “completely free;” it’s just pirated proprietary software that Microsoft hasn’t bothered to take down yet.
The definition of Free Software (a.k.a. “open source”) is having the legal right to read, modify, and redistribute the source code, not merely the technical capability.
Microsoft doesn’t own it, they didn’t program it. They paid a license fee to the developer to include it in Windows XP.
Whatever – whoever holds the copyright hasn’t bothered to take it down yet. Point is, even if it’s abandonware it’s not legitimately “free.”
(Also, I’m technically correct anyway: Microsoft owns GitHub, so it’d be the one acting on the copyright holder’s DMCA request. 😛)
EA (through Maxis) likely still owns this as it was part of their Full Tilt Pinball game. I can totally see EA pursuing this just because of their inner evil.
Also, I’m technically correct anyway: Microsoft owns GitHub, so it’d be the one acting on the copyright holder’s DMCA request.
Despite what Take Two would like you to believe, reverse-engineering software isn’t illegal unless it’s for circumvention of security measures (oversimplified). Distributing copyrighted assets, on the other hand, is. Since the GitHub repo doesn’t include the game assets, the only legal DMCA takedown that could be made here is against the Play Store app, in which case, Google would be handling it.
All that said, there doesn’t even seem to be a repo for this. There’s a different port done by someone else (fexed) last updated over two years ago, but this particular port seems to be closed source. Last update on Play Store was yesterday, but the last time any fork of the main repo was updated was last month.
You do know the code is copyrighted too, right? Reverse engineering isn’t the issue here; uploading the result to GitHub is.
Yes, the original code is copyrighted. A recreation of the code, however accurate, isn’t. Do you really think Nintendo would let decomps of so many of their games fly if they thought they had legal grounds to remove them?
This isn’t a reimplementation though, it’s a decompilation and recompilation of the exact binary and code.
No, that’s not how copyright works. Decompiling creates a derivative work, which is still copyrighted the same as the original. In order to have a proper clean reimplementation, you need to use a “Chinese wall” procedure whereby one person documents the behavior of the original program and then another person writes a new program from scratch using that description, without ever looking at the original program’s source code.
I don’t claim to know what Nintendo or its lawyers are thinking, but the law is pretty crystal clear that merely decompiling a proprietary program doesn’t magically make it not proprietary anymore.
Most people call that a cleanroom reimplementation
I don’t remember this game. I was pretty young back then tho
