You can find plenty of games in the Google Play Store, including several retro titles. Even if your favorite classic games aren't readily available there, you can opt for emulators to play them on your Android device. In order to preserve the classic titles (and relive the childhood memories), some people have further taken the challenge of decompiling the game code so that they can be analyzed and played on modern platforms. This time, a developer has ported the classic 3D Pinball for Windows to a form that works on any Android device.

The Pinball game has a very special place in the hearts of veteran Windows users. Originally bundled with the Microsoft Plus! add-on for Windows 95, it was later included in every major Windows release till Windows XP. The Microsoft variant, aka "3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet" was ported from a pinball video game called "Full Tilt! Pinball," published by Maxis. Although Microsoft doesn't have any plan to bring back this gem, the modding community managed to reverse-engineer the game code into a human-readable form a while ago. After extracting the original game assets and pairing them with the decompiled code, a skilled developer can port the game to any platform. This is exactly what Federico Matteoni did for the Android version.

Matteoni, who also goes by fexed on GitHub, picked up the original Android port of Pinball by Iscle and patched it up to offer a ready-to-compile version of the port. The fixed version comes with several improvements over the initial port, and new options such as togglable tilt buttons. Defining a custom player name is possible as well.

You can find the codebase of the 3D Pinball for Windows – Space Cadet port for Android and documentation on the GitHub repo created by Matteoni (linked below). In case you are looking for ready-to-install APK files, you can download them from the Releases section of the repo.

Pinball-on-Android GitHub repo

Thanks to XDA Senior Member Some_Random_Username for the tip!

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Source: Reddit