A******r
发帖数: 974 | 1 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2012/12/18/10378851
Windows XP was the last client version of Windows to include the Pinball
game that had been part of Windows since Windows 95. There is apparently
speculation that this was done for legal reasons.
No, that's not why.
One of the things I did in Windows XP was port several millions of lines of
code from 32-bit to 64-bit Windows so that we could ship Windows XP 64-bit
Edition. But one of the programs that ran into trouble was Pinball. 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.
If it makes you feel better, I am saddened by this as much as you are. I
really enjoyed playing that game. It was the location of the one Windows XP
feature I am most proud of.
Update: Hey everybody asking that the source code be released: The source
code was licensed from another company. If you want the source code, you
have to go ask them. |
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