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1. #SPACIE PINBALL YOUTUBE HOW TO#
2. #SPACIE PINBALL YOUTUBE CODE#
3. #SPACIE PINBALL YOUTUBE SIMULATOR#
4. #SPACIE PINBALL YOUTUBE WINDOWS#

While I understand the economics of why the Alpha situation happened (and would always have happened for the same reason MIPs and PPC went away) there will always be a part of me that wonders “what could have been” if the 64bit version of NT had hit the market instead of the 32bit version and the benchmarks really did justify the expense. I’m just guessing about what happened afterward because nobody informed me that they had gotten Pinball working and added it back. Whatever the problem was, somebody fixed it, and then they went back and re-tested Pinball with this fix, and everything worked great, so they put Pinball back. Or maybe there was a compiler bug, and the compiler team fixed that. My theory as to what happened is that some time after I removed Pinball from the product, the C runtime team realized that they had a compatibility bug in the way they set the default rounding mode, and they fixed it. My guess is that it had to do with the default rounding mode established by the C runtime library. NCommander did find a collision detection bug on the Itanium, although that bug was nowhere as severe as the one that existed on the Alpha AXP. And that’s the system that had the broken collision detector. I could test my 64-bit port on a physical Alpha AXP system to validate that it was successful.

#SPACIE PINBALL YOUTUBE WINDOWS#

The team set to work, and we had 64-bit Windows running on physical Alpha AXP hardware long before we had any physical Itanium hardware. The hard part was going from 32-bit to 64-bit. Once you got a 64-bit version of Windows working for the Alpha AXP, it should be a comparatively small amount of additional work to port it to Itanium.

#SPACIE PINBALL YOUTUBE CODE#

The assumption was somewhat validated by experience: The 32-bit Windows code base had been ported to many 32-bit processors, with relatively few architecture-specific issues. The assumption is that most of the effort in porting Windows to the Itanium is in the 32-bit to 64-bit transition, and not in dealing with quirks of the specific 64-bit processor you are porting to. But the Alpha AXP did have the advantage of existing in physical form, so the system could finish booting before the heat death of the universe.

Now, 64-bit Windows on the Alpha AXP would never ship. Solution: Port the Alpha AXP version of 32-bit Windows to 64-bit Windows. It’s just that 32-bit Windows used only the 32-bit subset. The Alpha AXP is internally a 64-bit processor.

#SPACIE PINBALL YOUTUBE SIMULATOR#

Booting Windows on an Itanium simulator took forever. The only way you could run any Itanium code was to run it in a simulator. When the 64-bit Windows project started, there was no Itanium hardware yet. I was amazed at the level of thoroughness (and the fortitude it required to get those Itanium systems up and running, much less debug them), but there’s one version of 64-bit Windows that NCommander didn’t try out, and that’s the one that’s relevant to the story. Retrocomputing enthusiast NCommander even undertook a Zapruder-level analysis of all of the 64-bit versions of Windows he could find to prove or disprove my story. One point of contention is over my claim that I removed Pinball from Windows because I couldn’t get the 64-bit version to work. People keep asking if it can be brought back. My proudest achievement of Windows XP was fixing the game so it didn’t consume 100% CPU.

#SPACIE PINBALL YOUTUBE HOW TO#

A customer used their support contract to ask how to change among the three levels of play in Space Cadet Pinball. Space Cadet Pinball has a special place in the hearts of many Windows enthusiasts.