Everybody knows the Pinball game that appeared with Windows 95 Plus!… It’s still in current Windows versions…
Although it may seem incredible, there are still some fanatics of this game…
I’ve made this program in 1999 (some time ago 8-)) to let you modify the High Scores so you could make those fanatics believe you had beaten them…
(You should be a little more subtle than me)
After starting, you must take into account I wrote this program when I was 13… So I’m dismissed for any possible criticism… Now, after that disclaimer, we can continue…
The tool is very easy to use…
But has some hidden features that make it a bit more powerful…
There are 3 easter eggs (it seems I really enjoyed writing them at that time) that unlock 3 special options… They must be made in the following order, otherwise they won’t work…
First of all you must open the about screen and wait for the legend to scroll 5 times (you can make it go faster by pressing Shift+U several times)… If you have the Caps Lock enabled you must not use the Shift key to press the U… (As an additional tip, not really useful anyway, you can make the text scroll slower again by pressing Shift+D)
Then, you must click sequentially the 4 crosses at the corners in this order: lower-right, upper-left, upper-right, lower-left. Anyway, if you start with the lower-right, the lines will guide you. That will enable the first “cheat”, which unlocks the “Show Verification Code” option at the main screen. The verification code is some sort of checksum used by the game to verify you didn’t modify the high scores.
The second cheat is the easiest… You must right-click the upper-right cross while holding Shift and then release it and left-click the lower-right cross… The “Print Hall of Fame” option will be unlocked… It’s a completely unuseful option, but it seems I wanted to develop my printing ability at that time… So don’t ask 
Finally, the latest easter egg (and the most useful of all) gets unlocked by doing the following steps: with the focus (the dotted rectangle) in the upper button, press Shift+P (again the same thing about Caps Lock)…
Then, move the focus to the next button by pressing Tab and press Shift+C…
That’s all… Now you’ll have enabled the possibility of exporting the scores to a .REG file so you can simply double click it on any computer to set the new scores…
This is how the main screen will now look like…
This tool was originally written in Visual Basic 6, so I opened the project, updated it to the .NET Framework 2.0 (VB.NET) and then fixed some bugs, corrected some things and prepared it to be published… I’m freeing the source code just for the ones who may have curiosity, but I don’t recommend taking it as model for anything…
To run it, you’ll need the .NET Framework 2.0 and the Microsoft Visual Basic PowerPacks 1.2.
UPDATE: I’ve just uploaded the required Visual Basic PowerPacks redistributable file since the ones offered online by Microsoft (2.0 & 3.0) does not fulfill the required dependencies. They seem to be different things. This redistributable is needed in order to be able to open the About box and unlock the special options.
As usual, Pinball Cracker is licensed under the GNU GPL v3 (attached)…
Here are the download links:
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