Whenever people mention Space Cadet pinball, I HAVE to recommend the reverse engineered open source version on github (source ports for almost every type of platform).
It's also available on flathub.
this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
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Ahh, my nostalgia. Thanks!
Are there revese engineered open source version of the other games?
I unfortunately don't know of any other games on top of my head. I know Lego Island is close to 100% reverse engineered, but I'm not certain it'll get released as an open source game like Space Cadet.
Ski free was available as an HTML 5 game years ago, so probably
"Reverse engineered open source" isn't a thing. You can decompile a program and look at the source code all you want, but that's not the same as having the legal right to modify and redistribute it. Open Source specifically means the latter.
What you've linked to there is just some pirated proprietary-licensed source code that, frankly, I'm a little surprised Microsoft hasn't taken down yet.
(Also, I don't like the term "open source" for exactly the reason that it leads to this sort of confusion. According to both the OSI and FSF it means the same thing as "Free Software," so folks should use the term Free Software instead since it emphasizes the four freedoms.)
If you want a pinball game that's actually Free Software, check out Vector Pinball. I recommend installing it via F-Droid.
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In paint be sure to make a bunch of random lines and then use the fill bucket to fill in random colors in the spaces.
Oooh I totally forgot that I did play with MS Paint! I invented cities, countries, or I just did what you described. Fun times!
I used pixel-level zoom and drew top-down Star Wars starfighters and then copied and pasted them to have battles.
How do you know?!?! This is one of the most laser precise call out to my childhood ive ever seen in an internet comment.
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All I see is four badass apps with no ads and no dark patterns.
I got a Minesweeper app for my phone a few months ago with no ads. It's amazing.
In general, get stuff like that from F-Droid. Ads and other enshittification basically isn't allowed.
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It's nice to know that even without internet, they still had Balatro ❤️
What about winamp and windows media center audio visualizers. Trippy patterns
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'Member when you bought a magazine and got a FREE floppy or CD with a bunch of (shareware/demo) games? I played the same 2 demo maps of Age of Empires to death - the game had 3, but the 3rd one was too hard for youngster me.
Navigating some Microsoft Bob ass Flash launcher where every installer link is a door on a space station, guided by the Coconut Monkey.
First Mount&Blade for me. It was hard capped so you straight up can not play after some level (?). I wonder how many times I rolled a stone on top of that mountain, only to gleefuly repeat the process after it felt back.
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I played the hell put of Freecell back in the day. Started going through the seeds in order, and over the course of about 2 years I made it through 1500 or so.
I should pick that up again. Only got about 30000 or so games left to finish the whole thing...
Space Cadet.
No love for SkiFree?
Encarta was the internet
Was Encarta the one with a trivia game? Or was that Britannica? Cause I remember my antisocial young self playing it to death.
I still got some useless facts stuck in my head, taking up valuable space.. I can't conjure any of them on demand; but someone could randomly mention a species of frog and I would go, "oh yeah, they're native to Madagascar!"
My Encarta 97 CD-ROM had a game where you went through rooms of a castle answering trivia questions to move on.
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skiifree was also a solid choice
And Chip's Challenge.
Had dialup from 1994, still spent hours playing Space Cadet and Solitaire.
What is this fancy shit? I had to launch my games with MS DOS commands.
> qbasic nibbles.bas
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I mean we did have internet, but it was billed by the amount of data you used, and being online meant that people couldn't use the phone at the same time.
Don’t forget Hover!
Man this takes me back.
Encarta and Paint were where I spent most of my computer time as a younger teenager. The trivia games on Encarta were dope, I also spent a lot of time walking around the 3d castles and ancient ruins. And a lot of time in the ummm.... Art section. Learned a lot about myself from Venus of Urbino.
Used to waste time by painting giant graphic and bloody battle scenes between stick figures in paint. Did it pixel by pixel! Good times!
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I just had a happy flashback into my pst of playing that pinball a lot.
I had totally forgotten that.
Thanks for triggering this memory :)
Your computers had games in colors?
Holding shift and dragging the selection box around in paint was like 60% of my computer classes.
I grew up with a a Windows 3.1 machine, so for me my game selection was Chip's Challenge, Miser Mind (MasterMind), WinTris (Tetris), Atmoids (Asteroids), and JezzBall. Oh and SkiFree of course but somehow I never played it.
Chip's Challenge was my favorite. To this day I still haven't beaten every level.
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Not shown: my Amiga500
And this was fancy stuff. Command prompts on an Apple IIe was my first computer experience.
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39 seconds on minesweeper expert
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