Assuming you are not just trolling, please elaborate.
Or do you want me to elaborate on why it's too bad? Well, pinball is the best game that was ever included with Windows, so it's unfortunate that it's not still there.
Second, the whole code base was one big, nasty, uncommented mud-ball. From the article: "... we simply couldn't figure out why the collision detector was not working. Heck, we couldn't even find the collision detector!"
I was genuinely curious to hear how you think sprinkling fairy dust open source on top of the mess is going to magically fix the issue. I am not talking about reimplementing the whole thing from scratch (which nobody is prohibiting you by the way). I am asking about the value added to the community to fix this particular piece of crap.
But, based on your response, I am going to risk even more karma and chalk it up to trolling. You did not address my question, and don't even look like having read the article or understood the issue. So... have fun!
In fact the problem was way worse, the program used floating point for movement computation and could accumulate floating point errors along the way and moved too much. The floating point size was changed in 64-bit and exacerbate the problem. That's probably why the collision detection didn't work.
It's better to rewrite from ground up than fix it.
Open source is not magic in the least. It just enables other people to try and help out if your project means anything to them.