| Product: |
Pinball emulators |
| Date: |
16.04.01 (2940 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: Pinball machines on your PC
Disadvantages: will never be as good as the real thing
This opinion is on Visual Pinball and Pinmame
Introduction
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The idea of emulating retro games on the PC has really taken a huge flight over the last years. The original Mame has developed from a DOS-based command line program to a Win95 GUI interface. In the mean time, the numbers of supported games has grown immensely, to around 5000 in its latest version. The idea of Mame was to emulate the coin-op games from the game-halls on the PC, using the original ROMS. Although not entirely legal (these roms are still copyrighted), I have not yet heard of anyone ever being sued for downloading, using or distributing either Mame or its roms. It is a very much fun way to relive those old games.
But coin-op video games is not the only thing that can be found in the game-hall. Usually, there were/are also other gaming machines, that have at least the same attraction-value: pinball machines. These games combined a physical game (keeping a metal shining ball in the playfield) with electronics (the bumpers, sliders, spinners, and whatever they invented). Pinball always has had an enormous attraction in the gaming scene, and it was only a matter of time before anyone was going to try and emulate those too.
Apparenly, some guys in The Netherlands have taken the challenge, and started building on a program to do just that and more, and called it Visual Pinball.
What is Visual Pinball?
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Anyone remember the Pinball Construction Set from somewhere back in the 80’s? You could place pinball objects on a playing field, and thereby create your own pinball table. Visual Pinball does just that, but then far more sophisticated. When you first start up VP, you face a screen that mostly resembles a drawing-board from a design program like autocad. This is the area where you ‘create’ your own pinball table, or incorporate an already available one. It is a 2D top-down view of the actual pinball table. Before I go into creat
ing your own table, I will first go into starting a table created by someone else.
Starting an existing table
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This is the easy part. First of course, you need to download a table from the internet, or should have created one up front. There is a VP forum, where people advertise the tables the just created, and there are a few download-pages. For these links, go to the end of this op.
Make sure you inzip them into the /tables directory in your Visual Pinball directory. Tables end with a /vp extension, so VP will immediately find them. Some tables are recreations of existing tables, (and some are extremely good-looking incorporating the original art from the machines themselves), some are designed from scratch.
When the table is loaded, press <F5>, and off you go. You now get a 3D-view of the table, just like if you were standing behind the actual table. You can use the standard mame keys, so 5 for inserting a coin, and 1 for starting the game. Off you go.
Additions
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As you play a table, you might find something missing. Especially the newer tables (The Addams Family, Twilight Zone etc), all have a DMD (Dot Matrix Display), which shows scores, and small movies when you his specific triggers. This is something which is not yet incorporated in VP, but there is a specific program for that. This program is called Visual Pinmame. It uses the original pinball roms, which incorporate music, voice, and the DMD-steering.
Limitations
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There are a few limitations of course. Most obvious, VP and Visual Pinmame should actually be one program. Also, each commercial table has -some- aspect which makes it unique. Usually, the difficult part is to emulate these unique items with the standard VP functionality. Future releases of VP will probably incorporate more abilities for this.
At this moment, both VP and Visual Pinball are still beta. This means, that they are still in constant development,
introducting more and more new functionality. However, they are already quite a number of high quality tables out there, and new ones appear each day/week. The core users are quite fanatic, and the resulting tables are usually quite amazing.
Creating your own table
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This is the difficult part, and I won’t go into too much detail about it here. When you startoff, you get a standard table, with flippers, plunger, and a basic shape. This table actually is fully working, although not much fun. Basically, you use the design-like interface to shape this basic table to your own liking. You can decide for yourself, whether you are going to recreate an existing one, or whether you are going to create your own.Anyone who has ever used Corel Draw, Designer or any other design-program, will feel quite at home. The possibilities are not endless, but the 20-odd basic shapes can be changed to your hearts content. The best learning-tool is checking out someones other table, and try to figure out how he/she did that one. After you created the lay-out, you need to create the scripting. This will tell the table what to do when the ball hits an object or trigger. This script is built in Visual basic, and is object oriented. Not too difficult, but it might seem alarming. Fortunately, there is help in the form of an online tutorial, and you can always revert to the forum for help.
Final stage is to play-test your table, and refine it, as you find out the ball can get stuck up that ramp you created. When it is finalised, release it on the crowd, and await their cheers.
Where to get it
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If, after reading this, you have become interested in VP and Visual Pinmame, this is where to find more info:
Visual Pinball: http://www.randydavis.com/vp/intro.htm
This site has a forum, download area, existing tables and links to other pages
Vpinmame: http://welcome.to/vpinball
Also features the Twilight Zone table, Attack from Mars and
many more. Best page to get your tables.
Happy pinballing, and let me know what you think of it.
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