3D Pinball: Space Cadet is one of the classic games found in early copies of Windows, first arriving in Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95, before being bundled into the operating system until Windows XP. However, Dave Plummer, who ported the game over from 95 to the NT version of Windows, admitted on his YouTube channel that he accidentally added a bug to the game that eventually led it to run at 5,000 FPS.
Plummer’s co-host read a message asking, “Did you ever have a programming ‘oops’ while working at Microsoft that made it into the wild — the approved software release?” Dave said that he probably had many, but one of his most memorable was when he ported 3D Pinball from Windows 95 to NT.
“Importing it [the game], I wrote an engine around their game engine in order to manage the video drawing, sound, and so forth. So, I made my own kind of game engine around their logic engine,” Plummer said. “My game engine had a bug that would just draw frames as fast as it could.”
However, Dave was running a single-core MIPS R4000 processor that ran at 200 MHz when he did that. This allowed the game to usually run at 60 to 90 fps, which was decent enough for that time. Apparently, he did not add a frame limiter to the title, so when more modern CPUs arrived in the early to mid-2000s, Space Cadet was “using an entire core of the machine to play pinball at all times whenever you’re running pinball.”
Because of this, the game could run as fast as 5,000 FPS, as processors at that time were way faster than what Plummer used when he ported the game over to NT. Thankfully, Raymond Chen, one of Plummer’s colleagues, fixed the issue, capping it to 100 fps and stopping the lightweight game from pushing a single core to 100%.
Although bugs are taken seriously at Microsoft, this game bug is harmless enough that it allowed the programmers involved to laugh it off. This wouldn’t have been an issue when computers still came with a turbo button, but this feature was generally dropped when most software stopped tying time steps to clock speed. Plummer wasn’t able to foresee this, but that’s understandable given how quickly CPU cores were advancing at the time.
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