Visual Pinball
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Visual Pinball is a program that allows programmers to create and play pseudo-3D renditions of pinball machines on a home computer. It is unlike any pinball simulation program made previously in terms of realistic graphics and physics. This gives pinball players an opportunity to play renditions of real pinball machines that they might not otherwise ever be able to in real life.
Visual Pinball rendition of Bally's Fireball (1972)
Visual Pinball was started in February 2001 by programmer Randy Davis. Visual Pinball uses the Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting (VBScript) programming language for relative ease of programming, but the program itself is written in [[C++]] with ATL (which helps in making ActiveX controls). Unfortunately, this also currently limits Visual Pinball to running on modern Windows PCs; Visual Pinball is not currently known to work with WINE, the Windows compatibility layer for Linux, and will not run on a Macintosh (except slowly under Virtual PC).
Visual Pinball can be seen as an important step in the evolution of pinball-based entertainment, especially as the availability of publicly playable machines has shrunk and currently only one manufacturer of real pinball machines (Stern Pinball, Inc.) exists today. As of 2005, there are hundreds of pinball machines that have been rendered for Visual Pinball. Modern pinball machines (especially those made after 1990) usually require the Visual PinMAME (VPinMAME) program in order to work. VPinMAME adds to the system requirements, and, like other MAMEs, uses image files of the actual ROMs from the physical pinball machines, and executes them on simulations of the actual embedded CPUs, sound chips, and displays from the physical machines. Visual Pinball without VPinMAME can also be used to make completely original pinball and pinball-like games (such as pitch-and-bat baseball, pinball bingo [gambling], pachinko [Japanese pinball], etc.) that never existed in reality, and hundreds of these exist as well.
In 2004, Christopher Leathley (a co-developer of Visual Pinball) created Future Pinball, which is truly 3D (you can even change the angle of view while playing, and several views track the ball in real-time or even allow you to play the game from the PoV of very near the ball), and in many respects much more powerful, but has much heftier system requirements (a multi-GHz CPU, a high-end 3D gaming card with advanced shader support, and lots of RAM) and will not work with VPinMAME (by design).
In 2005, David Foley purchased rights from Randy Davis for modification of Visual Pinball for a full-sized pinball cabinet based on Visual Pinball software. Chicago Gaming purchased rights for licensed tables from Williams Electronics. The VPMame team and Visual Pinball Development Community also joined in the effort to produce improvements to the Visual Pinball product and a few tables, which has yet to be produced. GlobalVR purchased UltraCade, and it is speculated that GlobalVR will release the pinball product, though no announcements have been made at the time of this writing.
