"Pinball 64-bit version had a bizarre bug where the ball would pass straight through" Not exactly true! Windows XP x64 Edition includes a fully functional x64 compile of Pinball. Only issues that exist is just minor graphical bugs, other than that, the game plays fine!

Why was this in the start menu

I don't think they meant the x64 version Because there's another 64bit version for the itanium

i dont remember where that rumor started, but could it have been the case in XP 64-bit Edition Version 2002?

It originated from "The Old New Thing", Raymond Chen claimed "The 64-bit version of Pinball had a pretty nasty bug where the ball would simply pass through other objects like a ghost." XP 64-bit 2002 Pinball crashes instantly upon launching, 2003 version fixed that issue and didn't have that bug that Raymond Chen mentioned.

maybe it was in development only then. who knows

That blog post was posted in 2012, so it's been already developed awhile ago. It's very likely Raymond Chen may of misremembered the development of porting Pinball to 64-bit and the development of Windows Vista was going on. Early Vista post-reset build 5048 did include Pinball.

They were talking about the IA64 version.

I love that the recycling bin is the bottom right by default instead of the top left. That's where it truly belongs and where it should still be by default today!

FYI: The game was ported to Linux a long time ago. $ sudo snap install space-cadet

Is this what happens when you don’t let @davepl1968 work on pinball? That fella wouldn’t let gfx bugs through!

I remember trying 64-bit XP at the time and because pinball looked weird and my Wi-Fi card wasn't stable, I assumed it was buggy trash lmao

That refers to 64-bit Edition, for the Intel Itanium, not x64 Edition for x86 with AMD 64-bit extensions. These are different.

You're talking of different circumstances. The bug was present with a particular setup when the hardware they wanted to ship with didn't exist at the time. Not that there was anything wrong with the 32bit one. They just wanted to get the bells and whistles for "the new thing".

I have it on a windows 11 laptop it works fine

And realistically they could have just brought over the 32 bit version

How can I download a safe copy of this 64 bit copy of Space cadet? Do you know a good source?

Its funny the history behind it... one of the main theories is it was a Kernel issue with x64 bit processor not dealing well with float values ... and breaking the collision... It was fixed back then...

Raymond Chen clarified this a few years ago. The pinball game does indeed have a 64 bit version, but he was not aware of it at the time.

Le problème de Windows XP 64 bit c'est que quasiment aucune appli ne fonctionnait correctement. C'est pour ça que cette version a bidée.

What a throwback

Well, you aren’t really showing a proof there that this is truly a 64-bit Pinball binary. Just because it’s installed into a certain directory, doesn’t turn it into a 64-bit binary. Inspecting the binary itself would be more convincing.

I forgot how annoying those system tray balloons were

iirc there's a collision problem if the 32bit version of the game is compiled for 64bit, you need to change some of the collision stuff to be 48bit which was done in x64 edition

Was really a 64-Bits Space Cadet pinball ported? Or they just straight up copy the 32-Bits one into the 64-Bits instalation?