Here's the scoop on the latest craze in computer pinball that's got everyone talking. Wish you could play a near perfect rendition of the Addams Family on your computer? Or maybe you'd love to play some of the great old classics from the 30's and 40's which are near impossible to find? With two of today's coolest new software products you can! Visual Pinball is a brand new computer pinball construction program (still in beta, and free for download) which makes everything possible. It allows table designers to create any pinball table they can imagine, using a simple layout editor and some simple scripting language knowledge. The game then generates the table in 3D and is fully playable. A large community of users has formed around this software and is in the process of recreating almost every pinball ever made. There are recreations of pinball tables from almost every decade available, and growing each and every day. Some of the recreations are professional quality and simply stunning to see. The only drawback to these recreations are that the game's logic, lights and sounds, must all be recreated by hand (and often from the designers memory). This is where our second piece of software comes into play. Visual PinMAME (a bi-product of the famous MAME emulator), when used in conjunction with the actual pinball game's ROM code (available for download from WMS site and other places), faithfully emulates a pinball machine's hardware, and thus faithfully reproduces the machine's lamp and scoring logic, sound effects and music, and alpha numeric and/or Dot Matrix Display. In essence the program fool's the ROM code into thinking it is running in a real pinball machine, rather than your desktop pc. When both programs are combined together, the result is simply out of this world. When you combine the 100% accurate emulation of a pinball game, with a professional quality table recreation done in Visual Pinball, the net result is a near perfect translation of your favorite pinball machine on your home computer. It's as close as you can get to owning the real thing on your pc. Sure it's not as fun as owning the real games, but it's the next best thing. One thing to remember as you begin, there are two types of tables being released to the public: Tables with Visual PinMAME(VPinMAME) support, and tables without it. If the table does support VPinMAME, you will need to legally acquire that game's rom code in order for the emulation to function. For more
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