Visual Pinmame and Visual Pinball are fast becoming a phenomenon in the emulation world. Pinmame has been around a while and though ground breaking in the emulation of pinball roms, it didn't really do much else. Then came Visual Pinball.

Visual Pinball allows you to design realistic pinball tables including original graphics and realistic physics. It does it by using Visual Basic scripts and this is where Pinmame comes in.

What the clever authors of Pinmame did was to hook it into the scripts from Visual Pinball creating Visual Pinmame.

What this did was to create a fusion of the realism of Visual Pinball with the accurate emulation of the original pinball game in Visual Pinmame.

This is still very new to me but I do like the fact it plays one of my favourite tables Partyland which originally came on Pinball Fantasies on the Amiga.

I have written this tutorial because of the confusing setup procedure and the fact I've had about 20 emails about it.

I hope you find it easy to follow and have lots of fun ;)

Oh! just a quick warning though. If you are using anti virus software with script protection like Norton then you will get a warning message every time you run a table. An annoying problem but not a fatal one.

There a four zip files you need to successfully play Visual Pinmame on you PC. Below you will find links to all four files...

1. Visual Pinball - This is the main program that creates and plays the tables. (5,177KB)

2. Visual Pinmame - This program is soley designed to display the LED's on pinball (1,391KB)

3. VBS2.33 - A set of scripts to help Visual Pinball draw tables and communicate with Pinmame. (104KB)

4. Pinmame Samples - These samples are used for the pinball table sounds. (463KB)

Remember you need all four files!

To play a Pinmame compatible table you will need two file. The first contains the pinball table roms for use in Pinmame and the second contains the table information for Visual Pinball.

Here is the link for AJ's VPinMame Tables

You will find both the tables and corresponding roms there. There are also Visual Pinball exclusive tables there as well.

For the tutorials sake download the Back to the Future table. You will need two files. The roms file is called bttf.zip and the table is called bttf_10.zip. Use the link above to get them.

For this section you will need a copy of Winzip. You can get Winzip from here.

Part 1. Installing Visual Pinball.

The easiest way to install Visual Pinball is straight from Winzip. Simply double click on the Visual Pinball zipfile and wait for the Winzip window to open. If you have the Winzip wizard running click the Winzip Classic button in the bottom left of the new window. You should now be looking at something like this,,,

You can now press the Install button or press Shift+I to install Visual Pinball. The first window will tell you about temporary directories so just click OK to continue. You will now be looking at the Visual Pinball setup welcome screen click next to continue. The next screen tells you about the license agreement. If you agree with it click I Agree and then the next button.

On this new screen you will need to change the path to C:\Pinball like this...

When done press next to continue and if you're happy with the installation press next on the next screen for Visual Pinball to install. When the installation has finished click the close button. You will see on you task bar that Winzip is still running so you will need to click it, press OK and close it.

Visual Pinball is now installed. You can run it from the Start Menu.

Part 2. Installing Visual Pinmame.

Firstly I have modified the Pinmame zipfile on easyEmu to create all the necessary directories needed for roms,samples etc... which the original archive didn't have.

To install Pinmame you will first need to right click on the Pinmame zipfile. and select "extract to..". In the window that open you will need to type in the "Extract to" box C:\Pinball\Pinmame like this...

Press the Extract button on the right and winzip will extract all the files. Now close winzip.

You now need to set up VPinmame,

To do this you need to open your C:\Pinball\Pinmame directory and double click on the setup file. You will see the following screen...

Click on the Install button and a couple of confirmation screens appear. Stop when you get to this screen...

As you will see all of the directories are setup for you in line with the easyEmu zipped VPinmame file so all you need to do is click OK to continue.

The next screen to pop up is for the Default Options...

Here you can change the options used by VPinmame when emulating pinball tables. Press OK when you're done and a small window will confirm that VPinmame has been set up correctly. Press OK and you will return to the main setup screen. If you wnat to change any settings then you can access them from this screen. Close the setup screen to continue.

Part 3. Installing the VBS2.33 scripts.

Right click on the VBS2.33 zipfile and select extract to. On the new window type C:\Pinball\Tables in the "Extract to" box like this...

Press the Extract button on the right and winzip will extract all the files. Now close winzip.

Part 4. Installing the Pinmame samples.

You must leave the samples in the zipped file. However you will need to copy the zipped file in to your C:\Pinball\Pinmame\Samples directory. If you are not sure how to do this check out the Basics tutorial.

What you should now have!

Here is a quick look at the directory tree for Visual Pinball / Pinmame...

Here's a quick run down of the directories...

Pinball

Doc - Visual Pinball documentation

Music - Music for Visual Pinball tables

Tables - Used to store pinball tables

User - For User Files????

Pinmame

cfg - Table config files

img - Screen captures

installpics - Part of PinMames help file

nvram - Table nvram files

roms - Where you put table roms.

samples - Where you put the pinmame sample zipfile.

VPinmameTest - Files for the Visual Pinmame tester.

Part 1. Installing the roms

You must leave the roms in the zipped file. However you will need to copy the zipped file in to your C:\Pinball\Pinmame\Roms directory. If you are not sure how to do this check out the Basics tutorial.

Part 2. Installing the tables

To install tables you will first need to right click on the table zipfile. and select "extract to..". In the window that open you will need to type in the "Extract to" box C:\Pinball\Tables like this...

Press the Extract button on the right and winzip will extract all the files. Now close winzip.

Here are the keys in Visual Pinball / VPinMame

There are also some options that you can change by right clicking on the running VPinmame screen. Here is VPinmame in action...

Not much to look at really.... but it adds the realism element to Visual Pinball. The menu settings you can change are...

There are also a few elements in Visual Pinball you can change. They are in the Preferences menu. Heres what you can change...

Finally we are now getting to the fun bit. To play a table you can either run Visual Pinball from the Start button and from the file menu select open or open the C:\Pinball\Tables folder and double click on the icon of the table you want.

Once the table has opened press F5 to start the table running. You should see something like this :)

Click thie picture for a larger version.

Press 5 to put in some money and away you go.