SpaceCadetPinball

Summary: Reverse engineering of 3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet, a game bundled with Windows.

How to play: Place compiled exe into a folder containing original game resources (not included).





Source: pinball.exe from Windows XP (SHA-1 2A5B525E0F631BB6107639E2A69DF15986FB0D05) and its public PDB

Tools used: Ghidra, Ida, Visual Studio

What was done:

• All structures were populated, globals and locals named.
• All subs were decompiled, C pseudo code was converted to compilable C++. Loose (C) subs were assigned to classes.

Compiling:
Project uses C++11 features and depends on Windows libs.
Compile with Visual Studio; tested with 2017 and 2019.

Plans:

• Decompile original game
• Resizable window, scaled graphics
• Loader for high-res sprites from CADET.DAT
• Maybe: cross-platform port
  • Needs UI framework with menu bar and dialog windows, like QT or Avalonia
  • Needs a way play sounds and midi
• Maybe x2: support for other two tables
  • Table specific BL (control interactions and missions) is hardcoded, othere parts might be also patched

On 64-bit bug that killed the game:
I did not find it, decompiled game worked in x64 mode on the first try.
It was either lost in decompilation or introduced in x64 port/not present in x86 build.
Based on public description of the bug (no ball collision), I guess that the bug was in TEdgeManager::TestGridBox