Why did Microsoft remove 3D Pinball game, Windows Vista onwards

[whizkidraj]

The 64-bit version of Pinball had a pretty nasty bug where the ball would simply pass through other objects like a ghost. In particular, when you started the game, the ball would be delivered to the launcher, and then it would slowly fall towards the bottom of the screen, through the plunger, and out the bottom of the table. Games tended to be really short. Two of us tried to debug the program to figure out what was going on, but given that this was code written several years earlier by an outside company, and that nobody at Microsoft ever understood how the code worked (much less still understood it), and that most of the code was completely uncommented, we simply couldn’t figure out why the collision detector was not working. Heck, we couldn’t even find the collision detector! We had several million lines of code still to port, so we couldn’t afford to spend days studying the code trying to figure out what obscure floating point rounding error was causing collision detection to fail. We just made the executive decision right there to drop Pinball from the product, says a blog post at The Old New Thing.

Source : The Windows Club

 

[Exterminator]

I liked it but you can still get it on windows 7 and Vista just requires some work.Check out this link which shows you how to get it and a few other things back http://www.askvg.com/how-to-get-good-old-3d-pinball-game-windows-calendar-and-clipbook-viewer-in-windows-7/

Or you can download just the 3D Pindall game http://microsoft-pinball-for-windows-vista-7.en.softonic.com/

 

[Ink]

I always wondered, installing Pinball FX2 by Microsoft Studios (123MB though).

I know who voted No.

 

[Jack]

It was awesome.......... I used to play it daily......

+1 White Nobster!

 

[McLovin]

One, of the best games that XP had. Used to play it day in day out till, I found other games.

 

[ultradolby1]

Original XP Pinball Game c/o Tweakhound

http://www.tweakhound.com/2012/12/19/original-xp-pinball-game/

 

[whizkidraj]

I always wondered, installing Pinball FX2 by Microsoft Studios (123MB though).

I know who voted No.

Hehe can I know who voted no. Did u ?

 

[McLovin]

Hehe can I know who voted no. Did u ?

Earth's an admin, he can do anything.