When Microsoft developers come to speak of their long-term work, they keep revealing exciting curiosities. So Dave Plummer now reported a bug in the pinball game that led to enormous frame rates.
Image rate grew with CPU performance
Anyone who owned a Windows PC in the late 1990s probably remembers the supplied pinball game “3D Pinball: Space Cadet”. In this there was a curious programming mistake that remained undetected for years. Former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer, known as one of the fathers of the Windows Task Manager, now explained on his YouTube channel “Dave’s Attic” why “3D Pinball” ran so amazingly liquid on the computers at the time. When porting the game from Windows 95 to Windows NT, Plummer wrote its own engine for graphics and sound – and overlooked a crucial point: his code let the image rate run indefinitely.
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On hardware at the time, such as a MIPS processor with 200 MHz, which was used in the porting, this meant only 60 to 90 frames per second – completely sufficient for a pinball game. But with the advent of faster multi-core processors, the error turned into a peculiarity that dealt with entire CPU cores. “On modern machines, the game suddenly drew 5000 frames per second,” Plummer recalls.
“My worst mistake”
The problem was solved by another Microsoft veteran: Raymond Chen added a limitation to a maximum of 100 fps into the code. This could even play a round of pinball in parallel to compile programs – a moment for Chen that he proudly looks back on to this day. Plummer himself describes the incident as a “worst Windows bug” that he has ever released, but the damage remained manageable. Errors that came to an official service pack were considered particularly embarrassing in the then Microsoft. It is all the more remarkable that the developers look more amused today.
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