Full Tilt Pinball (1996) on Windows 10

Introduction

Full Tilt Pinball is a 1996 game made by Maxis, the same company that later created The Sims. This is where the famouse Space Cadet comes from.
The game supported Windows 3.1 and 95. Thankfully, the developers did not rely on Win16 support on Windows 95 and instead on the disk we can find both a Win16 and a Win32 version, which requires some fixing to work on modern systems.

The game has some issues with Windows 10:

• The installer is 16-bit
• The installer refuses to install on NT-based systems (XP and later are all NT-based)
• The game has some issues with window positioning and redrawing
• The game launcher doesn't work

The game can be fixed similarly to Marble Drop, another Maxis game from that era.

What we need

• Your Full Tilt Pinball CD. The game was also included with the Marble Drop CD. If you lost the disc or if you don't have a CD drive, you can get a disc image from the Internet Archive. I will be using the Marble Drop CD for this tutorial.

Installing the game

Insert the CD (or mount the downloaded image), and browse the files on it. Find a folder called FullTilt, enter it. Inside, you'll see a folder called Win95; copy it to your C drive. Rename the Win95 folder on your C drive to FullTilt.

Fixing the game

Download this archive and open it.
Enter the FullTilt folder on your C drive and delete everything except the 3 folders (CADET, DRAGON, Pirates). Now copy the files from the archive into it. These launchers replace the original launcher and fix the window positioning and redrawing issues. Right click the 3 launchers and make shortcuts on your desktop. Now go to your desktop and rename each shortcut.

Enjoy!

Launch the game from the shortcuts and enjoy! You may need to configure the controls from the game settings.

Still not working?

If the game is not working, leave a comment below and I'll try to help you or send you a prepatched version.

Credits

• Cmdow, a command line utility to manipulate windows.