Visual Pinball
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Visual Pinball is a program that allows programmers to create and play pseudo-3D renditions of pinball machines on a home computer. It is unlike any pinball simulation program made previously in terms of realistic graphics and physics. This gives pinball players an opportunity to play renditions of real pinball machines that they might not otherwise ever be able to in real life.
Visual Pinball rendition of Bally's Fireball (1972)
The Visual Pinball program was first released to the public on December 19, 2000 by programmer Randy Davis. Visual Pinball uses the Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting (VBScript) programming language for relative ease of programming, but the program itself is written in C++ with ATL (which helps in making ActiveX controls). [1] Unfortunately, this also currently limits Visual Pinball to running on modern Windows PCs; Visual Pinball is not currently known to work with Wine, the Windows compatibility layer for Linux, and will not run on a Macintosh (except slowly under Virtual PC).
Visual Pinball can be seen as an important step in the evolution of pinball-based entertainment, especially as the availability of publicly playable machines has shrunk and currently only one manufacturer of real pinball machines (Stern Pinball, Inc.) exists today. As of 2005, there are hundreds of pinball machines that have been rendered for Visual Pinball. Modern pinball machines (especially those made after 1990) usually require the Visual PinMAME (VPinMAME) program in order to work. VPinMAME adds to the system requirements, and, like other MAMEs, uses image files of the actual ROMs from the physical pinball machines, and executes them on simulations of the actual embedded CPUs, sound chips, and displays from the physical machines. Visual Pinball without VPinMAME can also be used to make completely original pinball and pinball-like game simulations (such as pitch-and-bat baseball, pinball bingo, and pachinko).
In 2005, David Foley purchased rights from Randy Davis for modification of Visual Pinball for a full-sized pinball cabinet based on Visual Pinball software. Chicago Gaming purchased rights for licensed tables from Williams Electronics. The Visual PinMAME team and Visual Pinball development community also joined in the effort to produce improvements to the Visual Pinball product and a few tables. This project, known as UltraPin, was taken over by Global VR following the collapse of Ultracade, and is currently in location test.
