3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet was one of the first games I ever played. My brother and I used to take turns seeing who could get the higher score while enjoying the classic title on our family’s Gateway computer. It turns out that we could have played the game at a blistering 5,000 frames per second if we had just had a time machine, a PC from the future, and a monitor that still hasn’t been invented in 2025.
Dave Plummer, who worked on several key parts of Windows such as the Media Center, Task Manager, and native ZIP support, also ported 3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet from Windows NT to Windows 95. Plummer recently shared on his YouTube channel that a bug in the game could have allowed the game to run at around 5,000 FPS.
“My game engine had a bug, in that it would draw frames as fast as it could,” explained Plummer. Since the game was coded on a MIPS R4000 processor that ran at 200MHz, 3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet ran at between 60-90 FPS. But once hardware improved, a bug in the game emerged.
“Fast forward a couple of years later, somebody notices that on multi-core machines, it’s using an entire core to play Pinball at all times…”
“It was still drawing as fast as it could, but it was now drawing at like, 5,000 frames per second, because machines were much much faster than they used to be.”
Our friends at PC Gamer shared the story and provided more context.
Sadly, we will never see the buttery smooth dream of 3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet running at high frame rates on one of the best gaming monitors. The game was later capped to 100 FPS by former Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen.
The tale of fixing 3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet was shared on Dave’s Garage, another YouTuber channel run by Plummer.
It’s easy to joke about the situation now, but Plummer explained the seriousness of the bug at the time, stating, “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.”
Chen recently discussed the measures Microsoft took to reduce bugs in Windows 95, including checking the operating system’s app compatibility with a large number of PC programs.
Microsoft could probably benefit from some shaming about bugs in 2025. The tech giant has faced accusations of Windows 11 bricking SSDs recently. Privacy and security concerns caused Recall, which was supposed to be a flagship feature of Copilot+ PCs, to be delayed significantly.
Our Executive Editor Jez Corden recently argued that “Microsoft’s enshittification of Xbox, Surface, and even Windows itself — are all by design,” stating:
“When you look at Microsoft’s other products, like Windows 11, Surface, and even further back — the empty promises, the rug pulls, and broken promises, it screams to me of a company that simply isn’t willing to take a risk, or give products the time they need to shine…
Microsoft increasingly just seems to go where other companies, true innovators, say the money is — looking for the next fad to devour and process, rather than curate and cultivate. How will Xbox, Surface, or Windows 11, grow without risk, investment, and curating consumer confidence? In a world where Microsoft has enough capital to just move wherever the wind is blowing, it simply doesn’t seem to care. It doesn’t have to be this way.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in April that AI writes 30% of Microsoft’s code, so the company does appear willing to take risks and innovate, just not in a way everyone likes.
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