Pin MAME

[Inky]

A ? About PinMAME. Can you actually play the pinball game on it? I thought so, but can't figure out how, and I've downloaded the table and roms...

[oesii]

You need a couple of programs to make this all work. I tried looking for some FAQ's on the web but most of the sites I used to go to last year aren't around, this page has some nice links but most of the faq ones are dead: http://pinmame.retrogames.com/links.html

 

Ok, you need to get Visual PinMame, that's the program that will handle the roms and allow the game tables to be intergrated with the playing effects. For the tables you need to get and install Visual Pinball (separate program) : http://www.randydavis.com/vp/

 

Once you install both of these programs, hopefully the documentation in Visual PinMame will lead you through it, sorry I can be more specific, I haven't messed with my installation in over a year.

 

Actually, this site seems to have tutorials but you need to register to see them: http://www.shivasite.com/

[Nukey Shay]

Yup...when you execute a rom in PinMame, the Visual Pinball table will be loaded (if it's found). If not, you will just be emulating the roms only (without the pinball simulation).

[NE146]

It's all very confusing.. even to me. You need Visual Pinball (for the actual gameplay) and PinMame roms and associated tables (to play the arcade pinball game). Luckily I had some friends who put together a "do it all package" which basically installed all the needed components so I could just start it up and play! Unfortunately that was a year or more ago, I'm sure it's gotten a lot bigger since then. When I last downloaded it, the entire package I got was about 450+ megs of stuff.

 

But when you got it working... it's friggin SWEET Of course the dynamics are far from "real" pinball. But it's great playing some of the arcade pins on your pc.. wonky physics or not.

[raindog]

I tried to assemble a complete Visual Pinmame collection myself last fall. I got to 1.2GB and realized it was just too big a project for me at the time.

 

I'd love to see something a little less kludgy to simulate pinball games, but it seems to be the de facto standard already. Kind of irritating that it uses the MAME name since philosophically it's the exact opposite of MAME (closed source, only one platform, really difficult to get it going, authors don't seem to want to distance themselves from the actual tables...)