Space Cadet Pinball for Windows 95 recompiled for Linux running on Windows 11 as...

Space Cadet Pinball for Windows 95 recompiled for Linux running on Windows 11 as a Linux app under WSLg

Award for longest blog post title ever? Andrey Muzychenko has a great github repository where they decompiled the 25 year old Space Cadet Pinball application from Windows 95/XP and then recompiled it for Linux (and really any platform now that it's portable code!).

NOTE: Because this is a decompilation/recompilation, it doesn't include the original data files. You'll need those from a Windows XP disk or ISO that you'll need to find yourself.

I recently did a YouTube where I showed that Windows 11 runs Graphical Linux Apps out of the box with WSLg.

Here, they've taken a Windows 95 32-bit app and decompiled it from the original EXE, done some nice cleanup, and now it can be recompiled to other targets like Linux.

So, could I go Windows 95 -> Linux -> Windows 11 -> WSL -> WSLg and run this new native Linux executable again on Windows?

If you don't think this is cool, that's a bummer. It's an example of how powerful (and fun) virtualization has become on modern systems!

I just launched WSL (Ubuntu) and installed a few things to compile the code:

sudo apt-get install libsdl2-image-dev
sudo apt-get install libsdl2-mixer-dev
sudo apt install gcc clang build-essential cmake

Then I cloned the repo under WSL and built. It builds into bin and creates a Linux executable.

NOTE: Place compiled executable into a folder containing original game resources (not included).

I am a digital hoarder so I have digital copies of basically everything I've worked on for the last 30 years. I happened to have a Windows XP virtual disk drive from a VM from years ago that was saved on my Synology.

I was able to open it and get all the original resources and wav files.

Then I copy all the original resources minus the .exe and then run the newly built Linux version...and it magically pops out and runs on Windows...as a graphical Linux app.

Amazing! Have fun!

---

Sponsor: Make login Auth0’s problem. Not yours. Provide the convenient login features your customers want, like social login, multi-factor authentication, single sign-on, passwordless, and more. Get started for free.