Why Microsoft Pinball didn’t come with Windows Vista
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It’s one of the great mysteries of PC gaming. Whatever happened to the version of Pinball that accompanied Windows from 95 to XP like a faithful dog, albeit a jangly and clattery one? Some have speculated about legal issues, but it’s not that. Cue Microsoft software engineer Raymond Chen.“One of the things I did in Windows XP was port several millions of lines of code from 32-bit to 64-bit Windows so that we could ship Windows XP 64-bit Edition," said Chen on The Old New Thing. “But one of the programs that ran into trouble was Pinball. The 64-bit version of Pinball had a pretty nasty bug where the ball would simply pass through other objects like a ghost. In particular, when you started the game, the ball would be delivered to the launcher, and then it would slowly fall towards the bottom of the screen, through the plunger, and out the bottom of the table.
“Games tended to be really short."
Activision have let loose the minimum specs for their latest shoot-fest, Black Ops 2, and whilst using the same engine as the previous iterations it will be making use of more recent tech (with a jump to DX11) whilst also lopping off its base by losing support for Windows XP.
