Re: Pinball 2000 Wizard Block Kits

On Tue, 22 Apr 2008 22:39:24 -0700 (PDT), taylor34 <at93850@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

What I'd like to have are the tools used to make the original games in
the 90's. Obviously somebody still has them and the source code
somewhere. I have no idea why neither wayne or Gene has even thought
about making these available for a license fee. They make money,
modders can fix bugs and issues with games, win-win for everyone. I
can't even really think of any drawback. There are a lot of smart
people on this board, there are a lot of awesome things that could be
done. My first thoughts would be:

1) Fix the TOTAN jewel thing. I've heard endless thoughts about how
this screws up the game, should be a relatively easy fix.
2) CC could be finished finally with a lot of work.
3) Games like T2 could get a wizard mode for people who want to spend
a lot of time on it.

Obviously, the main draw would be to add and fix things for home
users. I'd pay for it too--I love T2 and would buy one in a heartbeat
for home if it had a little deeper ruleset. A new rom version could
make that happen. But unfortunately it's probably not going to
happen.

Taylor34

Sometimes just recreating the development environment for old software
is a herculean task. If the tools and source code is on floppies,
tapes, etc. by now it will probably suffer bit rot. There's probably
no documentation to say how to "put it all together" so you might have
to find someone who *might" remember. Then there's all the fun tricks
that programmers have done and never documented (changing config
files, environment variables, etc) and stuff that was never backed up.

An EE friend of mine recently went to work for a medical device
company. They've been selling the same blood pressure monitoring
product for years and after all this time a new bug was discovered.
Programmers are gone, the source code is lost, company part numbers
from the BOM do not map to manufacturer part numbers (seriously, the
company can not tell on the schematics what part NNNN is), and they
were so paranoid about copycats that they didn't label the parts on
the boards (no R1, C12, etc). Now they are reverse engineeering their
own product.

.

Relevant Pages

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