Pinball
Pinball games let you experience the fun of popular pinball systems right on your arcade cabinet or home computer. Many people add pushbuttons to the side of their cabinet to use as flippers in conjunction with popular pinball simulations such as the ones below.
Visual Pinball/PinMAME
Visual Pinball is a playfield pinball simulator. It came with a editor, so you could design your own tables. Visual Pinball has a lots of well created layouts of popular pinball tables from the real world.
PinMAME is an additional program that runs on top of Visual Pinball. PinMAME allows one to design and play a table that will use the actual rom images from pinball tables. These rom images often times have the table logic, sounds, and dot-matrix displays (generally orange) in them.
How to combine these?
Visual Install Pack will install Visual Pinball, PinMAME and setup all the intricate dependancies for you:
http://www.vpforums.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=37115
How to run on my cabinet?
You need a wrapper to get this to run in your cabinet. Visual Pinball is itself not cabfriendly.
Future Pinball
Future Pinball is the next generation Pinball Development System. It the same people behind Visual Pinball.
It allows you to design and play your very own pinball simulation in True real time 3D. It uses Advanced Physics to provide the best possible Simulation of a true to life pinball machine.
Future Pinball does not utilize PinMAME, nor does it have the option to use pinball table roms. Perhaps one day they will integrate the authentic rom functionality so tables will have true sound emulation and real dot-matrix displays.
How to run on my cabinet?
You should download the lastest version (from 1.5.2 or above) to get this to work on your cabinet, if you using the gameport. But if you use a keyboard hack, it may lose focus at the startup, so you need a wrapper. This wrapper should also work for cabinets, using gameport.
About Sticky Keys
Future Pinball allow table creators to use 2 speciel keys, that can been fully remapped by the application.
But some have oversaw this feature, and use stickykeys instead. it not very good in a cabinet, so they must been fixed. it is mostly very easy to change these fixed by just look in the sourcecode. Find the keyname (like "h"), and change it. Some creator have even putted these stickykeys into the top of the source, and only need to change it once.
Other Pinball
Here is a brief list to other good PC pinball simulators:
- Epic Pinball - A classic pinball game to dos (run fine with DOSBOX)
- Pinball: INVASION 2 - A very fun combination of galaga and pinball
