The Virtual Pinball Machine

Introduction

So, why did I build a full-sized virtual pinball machine?

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Back in 2012, I found myself loving pinball but strapped for cash as prices continued to rise. I first discovered pinball simulation through Farsight Studios' excellent Pinball Arcade. I downloaded it, bought a bunch of classic games that I either knew I loved or wanted to try, and played the hell out of it on my iPad. But, yeah...that wasn't much like pinball. Fun, but definitely a different form-factor. Not real pinball.

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I had been aware of virtual pinball machines for some time. The earliest ones were like this one--just a monitor with flipper buttons. I played one at the Winston Salem auction once and was not impressed. However, there are also models that take a more traditional approach. Take VirtuaPin for example. They use an actual pinball cabinet, a large flat screen monitor for the playfield, a smaller one to display backglass art, and an actual DMD (dot matrix display) to show the score and animations. This recreate as authentic a pinball experience as you can get from what is essentially a video game. Software-wise, public domain programs (Visual Pinball, Future Pinball, and others in conjunction with Visual PinMAME) are used to reproduce authentic-looking (but unlicensed) versions of hundreds of popular pinball tables that industrious hobbyists recreate with exacting detail and original ROM images (in the case of solid-state machines).

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Of course, VirtuaPin is really expensive, too. Their cheapest model is nearly $5,000. That's a budget-buster for me.

But a lot of people build their own machines. Some of them are as good looking or better-looking than the VirtuaPin machines . That got me thinking that maybe I could do it, too.

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And I did! 

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It is, hands down, the most ambitious project I've ever undertaken and, without a doubt, the coolest. I started the project in mid-October of 2012 and finished it up about three months later, drafting it into service in my arcade on December 9, 2012.

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During the course of my build, I had to consult a LOT of different websites to find the information I needed. Because that was kind of a pain, I decided to document the hell out of the process. In the seven years since I initially posted my build notes, online resources have improved a great deal. There is even a thriving Facebook group for virtual pin builders now, and a small, affordable, commercially-produced virtual pin is being sold at places like Walmart. But, since I went to all the trouble--and because a number of people have thanked me for making the info available, I'm going to keep this page active.

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