I decided to write this short article after I had an experience that I would qualify traumatic: Eight-ball deluxe is the first Mac pinball which does not play any more.

MacOS has been ensuring a fair backwards compatibility over the years. On the other hand Mac pinballs have been around for just ten years now (Tristan, 1991) which means they appeared at the same time as MacOS 7 (which at that time was called just System 7). It is thus more or less natural that they play under MacOS 9.

This is indeed the case for all pinballs I tested with one notable exception: Eight-ball deluxe. The reason is that in MacOS 9, Apple introduced a new file system, incompatible with the one used previously. Now, most pinball games do not care about these things ... with the exception of 8-ball. Because AMTEX had some crazy high-score contest (I would be interested to know if anybody has ever collected an AMTEX high-score prize) they had to have some special score file. Unfortunately this breaks the game at startup under MacOS 9. (The protection of 8-ball where it detects system changes and asks you to reinstall is also another factor of instability).

So what can we do? Well, for one, write to Fujita-san, at Littlewing, and kindly request that he spend some time patching 8-ball. It is a loss of time for him and he will not do it unless he has some hope to sell new copies of 8-ball (probably in what he calls internet edition). Moreover I urge all of you to buy his excellent new pinball JINNI ZEALA. This would not only encourage him to produce new Mac pinballs but also, perhaps, to patch 8-ball.

But, 8-ball is only the tip of the iceberg. A major disaster is looming ahead. MacOS X made his entry in our life this year. For the time being Apple is ensuring a backwards compatibility through what is called the Classic environment. Which means that most Mac pinballs can play on new machines just as they did before. However it is clear that at some foreseeable future classic compatibility will be dropped. Nobody knows when exactly this will happen: two-three years is a ball-park estimate. When Classic disappears all Mac pinballs are dead. In order to run under OSX an application must be either native (written specifically for OSX) or carbonised (complying with the specific ensemble of APIs established under the name of Carbon). No Mac pinball is carbon-compatible to date. Gerard Putter has some plan to carbonise Royal Flush (but it is a lot of work and do not forget that he will be doing it just for the fun of it, since he is offering RF as a freeware). So, what can we do? I guess that the new Mac pinballs which will be coming out in the future (provided there are any) will be carbonised. But if you wonder how you will be able to play your ProPinball favourites I have only one suggestion. If you can afford it, keep your old Mac around with MacOS 8.6 (which, by the way, solves the 8-ball problem). You will be able to play these classic pinballs for quite a few more years.

Basil Grammaticos
grammati@paris7.jussieu.fr
November 2001