Got pinBalls ?
Saturday, March 29th, 2008When i was a kid, i used to go a lot at my local arcade games playground. Between the arcade electronic machines i’ve found a particular interest for pinballs or flippers. Ever since i got my hands on a PC i dreamed of playing a real pinball game on Windows. The best pinball game i found on the web was KISS. Even though it was quite good the screen was moving on the table wherever the ball was and it was tricky to know from where the balls would come if i had multiball for hitting the Jackpot. Also interesting was the fact that this pinball game had also some kind of Dot Matrix Display which represents a vital part for a real pinball game. A few days ago, i found on a friends computer Visual Pinball. It is a very interesting tool to create copies of real pinball tables and believe me there are a lot of already made copies fo real tables with this software. As i said before, a vital part of a pinball machine is the DOD. The DOD shows info about how many balls, credits, points and what do you have to do to achieve the missions. Some smart guys that also worked on emulating electronic arcade machines on the PC (MAME) have also created a software that works in conjunction with Visual Pinball and links the ROM that shows the info on DOD.
Here are the steps to help you play copies of pinball tables such as Twilight Zone, Last Action Hero, Rocky and Bullwinkle on your very own PC with Windows.
Step 1 : Download Visual Install Pack from http://irpinball.ztnet.com/ . It contains both Visual Pinball and Visual Pinball MAME so you don’t have to worry about making the 2 programs to work together.
Step 2 : Install Visual Install Pack. A screen with installing Visual PinMAME and all you have to do is clicking Install, setting up paths for roms and tables if you don’t install in C:\Program Files\Pinball\ and clicking QUIT.
Step 3 : In order to play for example Twilight Zone you have to download the appropriate table design created with Visual Pinball (i found Twilight Zone version 7.3) and appropriate ROM for the emulation of the DOD (i found Twilight Zone 9.2. to work with table Twilight Zone version 7.3). For downloading table Twilight Zone 7.3 you have to make an account and register on vpforums.com (search at letter T and scroll down for the link that will download tz_73 archive). For no reason i couldn’t register on vpforums.com so i logged in using a different valid user and password found on the Internet for vpforums.com .
Step4 : Download the Twilight Zone version 9.2. from ipdb.org . IPDB is some kind of IMDB of pinballs. It stores a lot of pinball ROMS and you don’t have to register somewhere to download the ROM. Scroll down on the page and click Pin MAME Rom Sets (9.2.) . Usually the largest ROM file and probably with the highest version name is the best archive to download. Note that there is even a 9.4. version and a P-4 version and one or both of them might work with the table. I’m currently playing Twilight Zone with table version 7.3 and ROM version 9.2. so that’s why i advise you to download these versions.
Step 5 : Copy the decompressed table archive tz_73 in C:\Program Files\Pinball\Tables or the Tables folder of Visual install Pack folder if you have installed it somewhere else and copy and decompress rom archive tz_73in C:\Program Files\Pinball\ROMs or the ROMs folder of Visual install Pack folder if you have installed it somewhere else on your computer.
Step 6 : After installing Visual Install Pack, a shortcut to the executable of the program should have appeared on you desktop. Click it and after opening click File/Open, search for the Twilight Zone folder in Tables folder (the decompressed archive you’ve paste it there during Step 5) and Open it. Press button Play on the left, another screen will appear with various settings, press OK and soon the table with appropriate emulation of the DOD will appear. Have Fun!
