Space cadet was my jam!

I had internet, I used all those a bunch...

I'm not a nostalgic one, but Space Cadet got me with all the good feels.

MS paint used to have a spray paint tool. I spent a lot of time using that tool to fill the entire canvas.

Kids and their fancy winders machines...
- That doesn't look like GORILLAS.BAS

All I see is four badass apps with no ads and no dark patterns.
- I got a Minesweeper app for my phone a few months ago with no ads. It's amazing.
  
  In general, get stuff like that from F-Droid. Ads and other enshittification basically isn't allowed.
  
  https://apps.kde.org/kmines/
  For Linux, Mac, and Windows (sorry bsds)

Space Cadet.

I mean we did have internet, but it was billed by the amount of data you used, and being online meant that people couldn't use the phone at the same time.

Whenever people mention Space Cadet pinball, I HAVE to recommend the reverse engineered open source version on github (source ports for almost every type of platform).
It's also available on flathub.
- "Reverse engineered open source" isn't a thing. You can decompile a program and look at the source code all you want, but that's not the same as having the legal right to modify and redistribute it. Open Source specifically means the latter.
  What you've linked to there is just some pirated proprietary-licensed source code that, frankly, I'm a little surprised Microsoft hasn't taken down yet.
  (Also, I don't like the term "open source" for exactly the reason that it leads to this sort of confusion. According to both the OSI and FSF it means the same thing as "Free Software," so folks should use the term Free Software instead since it emphasizes the four freedoms.)
  If you want a pinball game that's actually Free Software, check out Vector Pinball. I recommend installing it via F-Droid.
- That’s great. Fun memories! Simple but exciting
- Thanks for the Linux link! Where is that on the git
  
  I assume you ask where in the Git mention the Flathub link since Flathub deems it unverified? It's on On Linux section of the ReadMe
- Are there revese engineered open source version of the other games?
  
  I unfortunately don't know of any other games on top of my head. I know Lego Island is close to 100% reverse engineered, but I'm not certain it'll get released as an open source game like Space Cadet.
  
  Ski free was available as an HTML 5 game years ago, so probably
- Ahh, my nostalgia. Thanks!

I loved that game so much.
- You can still play it
  https://flathub.org/apps/com.github.k4zmu2a.spacecadetpinball
  
  Loved. Past tense.

I just had a happy flashback into my pst of playing that pinball a lot.
I had totally forgotten that.
Thanks for triggering this memory :)

I played the hell put of Freecell back in the day. Started going through the seeds in order, and over the course of about 2 years I made it through 1500 or so.
I should pick that up again. Only got about 30000 or so games left to finish the whole thing...

What about winamp and windows media center audio visualizers. Trippy patterns
- Have I got good news for you.
- How would you acquire winamp without the internet?
  
  It was bundled with the computer, my father won at a lottery.

In paint be sure to make a bunch of random lines and then use the fill bucket to fill in random colors in the spaces.
- How do you know?!?! This is one of the most laser precise call out to my childhood ive ever seen in an internet comment.
- Oooh I totally forgot that I did play with MS Paint! I invented cities, countries, or I just did what you described. Fun times!
  
  I used pixel-level zoom and drew top-down Star Wars starfighters and then copied and pasted them to have battles.
- I would do that with the spray paint, then select two colors on the bucket and fill them in alternating back and forth, slowly progressing outward, until the entire picture was one color. Good times.
- I'd fill the whole screen, then use the freestyle cutting and go wild with the mouse, then delete the selection, leaving a weirdly neat 2-color mosaic
- Em spaint was always fun.

It's nice to know that even without internet, they still had Balatro ❤️

I grew up with a a Windows 3.1 machine, so for me my game selection was Chip's Challenge, Miser Mind (MasterMind), WinTris (Tetris), Atmoids (Asteroids), and JezzBall. Oh and SkiFree of course but somehow I never played it.
Chip's Challenge was my favorite. To this day I still haven't beaten every level.
- 3.0/3.1 user also... paint always felt like a downgrade from paintbrush.
  
  Yeah you could set custom colors in Paintbrush, which was removed in Paint and I don't think was ever restored.

You can play a reverse engineered version of Space Cadet from the AUR!
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/spacecadetpinball-bin

skiifree was also a solid choice
- And Chip's Challenge.

39 seconds on minesweeper expert

Loved old school paint. I used to try and recreate 3d renders of Nintendo characters that I'd seen printed in magazines and on my Gameboy pocket pouch by doing a kind of primitive dithering technique that 10 year old me thought up drawing 1 pixel blocks of specific colours in alternating patterns to try recreate shading or gradients of colour and I'd draw whole rows of them with the line tool which naturally had a staircase effect to it. Used to save it all on a zipdisk.

'Member when you bought a magazine and got a FREE floppy or CD with a bunch of (shareware/demo) games? I played the same 2 demo maps of Age of Empires to death - the game had 3, but the 3rd one was too hard for youngster me.
- Navigating some Microsoft Bob ass Flash launcher where every installer link is a door on a space station, guided by the Coconut Monkey.
- First Mount&Blade for me. It was hard capped so you straight up can not play after some level (?). I wonder how many times I rolled a stone on top of that mountain, only to gleefuly repeat the process after it felt back.
  
  There had to be a moment, studying classical mythology, where you went "Hey, wait."

Not many people owned a PC before the internet blew up
- But in my neck of the woods plenty of people owned a PC before Windows networking AND ISPs were reliable lol
  Like yes I had Internet at home, but sometimes it didn't work very well, sometimes it was really slow, etc.
  For years, it was almost normal in a small town to have an ethernet cable routed from your neighbour's house to yours, share a connection. Guess what, it'll be slow as shit when they're using it too. Or if the router needs to be restarted for some reason and they're not home? Welp.
  Why did we have that setup? Estonia over 20 years ago was still pretty poor. This whole ADSL thing was pretty new too, it cost quite a bit. I found an article from that period and turns out in 2003 there were three main providers. Starman at 149 EEK per month, Eesti Telefon at 345 and Uninet at 800. I have no idea about Uninet, but Starman was only available in a couple of cities and even in those cities I think it was mostly just apartment buildings. Minimum monthly salary BEFORE tax was 2160 EEK. First 1000 EEK per month was income tax free, on the other 1160 EEK you'd be taxed 26% so 301 EEK. The remaining 1859 EEK, and this is with only income tax deducted, nothing else, is equivalent to 119.16 euros. 345 EEK for internet is 22 euros and change. Imagine spending 18% of your income on an Internet connection!
  Still, a computer was becoming necessary for schoolwork. Researching subjects online, printing out homework, etc. If you didn't have one at home, you'd need to use computer class at the end of the day, or go to the library. Having one at home got me into gaming and tinkering with software and the tinkering got me into programming at the age of ~13 and you can guess what I do for a living now.
  
  US here. I got my first "home computer" a TRS-80 CoCo (16k RAM) sometime around 1981 before PCs were a thing. The internet existed but cost around $7 US per hour plus it was a long distance call to Compuserve the only ISP which would have cost around 50 cents a minute (on a 1200 baud dial up modem). I still have an advertisement somewhere. Also i have a thin book of websites. You had to type in the IP address because domain names didn't exist yet. I couldn't afford any of this so I visited BBS's though I did fumble around with the internet on public library computers. The Macintosh and PCs came out a few years later but few homes had one because they were expensive and you couldn't do much with them besides play games. Businesses of course had them because they were useful. It wasn't until the mid 90's did everyone buy one after the internet got popular.

Encarta was the internet
- Was Encarta the one with a trivia game? Or was that Britannica? Cause I remember my antisocial young self playing it to death.
  I still got some useless facts stuck in my head, taking up valuable space.. I can't conjure any of them on demand; but someone could randomly mention a species of frog and I would go, "oh yeah, they're native to Madagascar!"
  
  My Encarta 97 CD-ROM had a game where you went through rooms of a castle answering trivia questions to move on.
  
  Iirc encarta was an encyclopedia software

No love for SkiFree?
- Obligatory XKCD - https://xkcd.com/667/
- https://ski.ihoc.net/
  
  Well there goes the rest of my day, thanks.

haha what a funny post.
- Username is fitting
  
  they could have at least made a loss meme out of it

Man this takes me back.
Encarta and Paint were where I spent most of my computer time as a younger teenager. The trivia games on Encarta were dope, I also spent a lot of time walking around the 3d castles and ancient ruins. And a lot of time in the ummm.... Art section. Learned a lot about myself from Venus of Urbino.
Used to waste time by painting giant graphic and bloody battle scenes between stick figures in paint. Did it pixel by pixel! Good times!
- Fucking encarta! I always am amazed that no one else my age remembers that. I don't think I ever found the art section interesting... I don't even remember it.

You didn't have diskettes or CDs in your neck of the woods?
- 500 games on 10 CD-ROMs 👌
  (485 of them are shareware demos you can only play for 15 minutes at a time, but still)
- I was going to say, I didn't have Internet until college we still had CD-ROMs, game consoles, and of course the public library for Internet when needed. Not that these options aren't excellent free entertainment.

Don’t forget Hover!

this is how i learned how to play hearts!
- this is how i learned i suck hard as fuck at hearts

Had dialup from 1994, still spent hours playing Space Cadet and Solitaire.

What is this fancy shit? I had to launch my games with MS DOS commands.
- > qbasic nibbles.bas
- and everything was green

Your computers had games in colors?

And this was fancy stuff. Command prompts on an Apple IIe was my first computer experience.
- MS-DOS and qBasic for me 😂
  
  Gorilla and Snake were my pre-internet.