"If you had a bug that actually made it into the product and required work in a Service Pack, that was never a laughing matter. That was kind of a shameful thing."

Well this is no longer true, W11 is a mess

I guess I could be a writer for PC Gamer since I already watch Dave's youtube videos.

PSA: Space Cadet Pinball has been reverse engineered and you can now run it on most popular platforms and even consoles. (flatpak version)

This is kind of misleading though. It was common at the time for games to run as fast as possible and then break as CPUs got faster.

One famous example is Wing Commander which is unplayable on a Pentium-class machine because it runs too fast.

This is also why DOSBox has a speed setting and a keyboard shortcut to adjust it at runtime.

"My game engine had a bug, in that it would draw frames as fast as it could" said Plummer. At the time, the game was being coded on a MIPS R4000 processor running at a mighty 200 MHz, which resulted in the game running at 60-90 fps, a speed Plummer judged as "plenty, for a game like that."

We used to build Java games in a class, and the "cheat code" to every game was always open a shit ton of other stuff so the game ran slower than intended and was easier.

It was always so smooth.

Lots of games were like this way back in the day. I remember my dad has a 286 and had a DOS game called Deathtrack. You're in a car with guns and you shoot other cars. First person view. "3D"ish where everything was just a wireframe polygon.

Ran fine in the 286. Then we got a 386 and it was totally unplayable because the moment the race started you had already crashed. It didn't run 2x faster, it ran like 50x faster which was impossible to adapt to. The frame rate was governed only by the speed of the CPU. Wild shit.

A bug which was later fixed by Raymond Chen.

The pinball game itself was licensed from Cinematronics/Maxis Full Tilt! Pinball, which had two additional tables as well as a sequel, both of which I still have on CD somewhere because I am a gigantic nerd.

Software Turbo button.

The bug was fixed by another ex-Microsoft engineer, Raymond Chen. Speaking on Plummer's other YouTube channel, Dave's Garage, Chen fondly remembers adding a frame rate limiter, thereby reigning the game in to a 100 fps maximum.

And now that we have monitors running at over 100 Hz, that's too low...