Looking For Advice on Virtual Pinball Machines

[Skippy B. Coyote]

Hey there everyone

After experiencing the joy of adding a multicade arcade machine to my gaming center last year I've come to the point where I'm really (really) itching to add some kind of pinball machine to my gaming area too, and I'm leaning towards a mini size virtual one from http://virtuapin.net

 

For the last year or so I've been playing real pinball machines regularly at some some local bars and pizza joints, and I've also been playing the heck out of The Pinball Arcade on my 7" Android tablet. I seem to be one of those odd pinball fans who enjoys playing real mechanical tables and virtual ones equally, at least when it comes to the recreations of real tables available in The Pinball Arcade.

 

This makes a virtual pinball machine pretty attractive to me, since I already know that I can have a lot of fun playing digital recreations of the real pinball tables I like best and I'm also pretty short on space in my apartment. I wouldn't be able to make space for more than one pinball machine, so being able to have dozens or even hundreds of different pinball tables in the same machine makes me think that I'd get a lot more replay value and long term enjoyment out of a virtual machine than I would a regular one. I'm also not the most technically inclined of people, and I get the impression that a real pinball machine would require a lot more long term maintenance work than I'd be comfortable doing to keep it running well.

 

All those factors combine to make the hardware of a virtual pinball machine look much more attractive to me than a real one, but I could still use some advice on what exactly to purchase for the hardware and what kind of software will provide me with the most realistic experience. So far my only experience with digital recreations of real pinball tables has been playing the tables on the Android version of The Pinball Arcade, and I'm a little worried that the freeware tables available for Visual Pinball (which seems to be the most popular option for virtual pinball machines) might not have the same level of authenticity. Are there any resources that others who have experience with Visual Pinball would recommend for finding the best quality reproductions of real pinball tables? And how do they compare to the quality of The Pinball Arcade tables? Specifically, the tables I'm interested in the most are The Lord of the Rings, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Firepower, and Fireball. I'm not asking for links to ROMs or anything like that, since I think that would be against AtariAge policy, but a comparison of table authenticity between Visual Pinball and The Pinball Arcade would be really helpful!

 

Lastly, would a VirtuaPin Mini be a good hardware choice? I really want to invest in the absolute best quality mini size virtual pinball machine that I can get, and while the research I've done so far does make the VirtuaPin machines appear to be the best quality and most full featured machines on the market, I am totally open to suggestions for other manufacturers if anyone thinks that there are other companies making better quality machines.

 

If you made it this far then thank you for taking the time to read through my long rambling post, and any insight you might have to offer would be greatly appreciated.

[rxd]

I recently got one of the larger versions of that companies machine. I'm happy with it. Also Visual Pinball is more realistic than most of the other pinball games I have.