Thoughts on Visual Pinball and VPinMAME?

ComputerSpaceFan · February 6, 2010

Anyone here tried out Visual Pinball? I dabbled a bit a year ago and I'm getting back into it now. I have read their site and forums and have some rudimentary questions, stuff their own forums go into far too much detail for. I am wondering if any Atari Age folks have tried these programs out and might be able to give me the "Coles Notes" versions of answers.

For anyone who doesn't know, it lets you emulate pinball machines on your computer. Here's an awesome site that explains how to get it to work.

I noticed they now have 16x9 tables instead of the old 4x3 tables they had when I first got into it. This makes me wonder if they have worked on a way to get the idea of Ultra Pin (which was cancelled in 2008) achievable using just your regular PC and a couple of monitors.

And before anyone asks, yes I have searched their forums.

What I'd like to ask our forums, for those of you who have tried this cabinet table idea, is how do you like it? Is it worth pursuing? From what their forums say, it sounds like you need a fairly high end computer and there seems to be a whole bunch of problems getting the table to display on the 16x9 screen in front of you and also getting the backglass / DMD to display properly on the second upright monitor above. And then there's buying a Pinball Wizard controller as well on top of that.

As I mentioned earlier, I do have the program running on my computer and it's a lot of fun. Then again, there's only a dozen or so tables I like. So is going to all this extra cost and work (and potentially headache) really that enjoyable? Or am I wrong and the multiple display works easily? How much does a decent refresh-rate widescreen LCD monitor go for these days?