@codinghorror Is it possible to add flashers, knockers or any kind of force feedback to the virtuapin mini? Is there space for it? Looks great!
Thanks for postā¦worth reading nice one
Sure thereās room, but how would it work? E.g. itād need to replicate the force feedback of a 360 controller to work with Pinball FX 2.
I was a pre-adolescent boy during the glory days of the 1970ās electromechanical pins, and was age 13 right about the time that Bally Playboy (and early digital) came out, and can remember going to the teen disco with my friends around that time and being too scared to hit on girls, we would always wind up in the pinball area (I specifically remember the machine there being Bally Six Million Dollar Man - which transitioned to the video arcade era when the classic video game Big Bang happened.
Anyway, when I got to college age, I was no longer scared to pick up on women, so I didnāt play much pinball or video games, but did start getting back into both with the Williams Fire! pinball and the R-Type video game when I was a grad student at Georgia Tech. After school, a friend of mine bought an old machine, and I decided I wanted to get into this hobby, so I bought ā¦ a Playboy! Many years later I now count 21 in my herd, about equally divided into electromechanical & digital (yes, Iām a bachelor, LOL). I have a hobby interest in setting up a application that could simulate an electromechanical machine as a state machine - i.e., such that the entire game play could show the states of all the electromechanical elements (it wouldnāt be like Visual Pinball, but something with a bunch of Button controls that would be serve to actuate something getting hit, etc.) Of course, I should really get all my pins in perfect working order before I get into doing that, LOL.
To me, the realness of pinball is something that virtual pinball cannot reproduce; in some ways the electromechanicals are even more real as there are the clunky relays, switch disks and the āheartā, the score motor cam. That said, when Iām on the road, I sometimes play Virtual Pinball (although it really needs some structure as it seems to be a complete mess to actually get a game properly installed), and I have used Virtual Pinball to ātest-driveā new pins that I have added to my herd.
I submitted some PRs to the DMD extensions project, so that the Virtual DMD on a monitor is a bit closer to a real DMD look:
The left bottom is what it used to look like, way way dim .. the right bottom is what it looks like now if you pass --color ff0000 at the command line, but the default Colors.orangered is pretty good too!
The dots are quite close together on a real DMD
Great review. Your guided tour of the inside of your VirtuaPin Mini cab helped me immensely learning the internals of mine.
I agree 100% with what you wrote (including the Ferris reference) about the hardware. Itās top notch and the amount of workmanship displayed is pretty impressive.
Canāt really support your reasoning for TPA over VP. Yes, many VP tables are past their prime, but I would put up some of the VPX tables I have on my Cab against anything farsight has put out.
I also canāt abide by your insinuation that the āunlicensedā tables are somehow taking food out of peoples mouths. With the exception of Stern, all the other pinball manufacturers have been out of business for decades. Gottlieb is a VC group that picked through the remnants of their Bankruptcy to purchase the rights to the name. And Scientific Games bought the rights to all the WMS assets and has done nothing accept charge licensing fees for the use of the name.
Canāt say I am enthusiastic paying licensing fees to a bunch of corporate jackals that did nothing but pick up the name via bankruptcy auction or corporate buyout.
Most VP authors do their work out of a labor of love for the game and not pure profit. Not sure why that is so distasteful to you. If the money were going to the actual designers and employees that made these beautiful machines, then that would be one thing. But itās not.
I do love TPA and once their cab support gets better, I might give them a shake, But until then, Iāll focus on the best VP pins I can find.
Thanks for the Timeshock tip, though. Iām going to buy Timeshock and Cab it up this week. It should look amazing.
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I guess it is just a personal preference. To me, VP tables look (and play) like games built in the 1990s out of construction paper. I vastly prefer full 3D table simulation for the better physics, freedom of camera movement, and generally superior simulation of the real world versus a bunch of 2D bitmaps and hardcoded values.
Got Timeshock running on the Cab, and everything you said is true. Itās bliss. Kind of puts all the other tables to shame. Adjusting the view is a little wierd, but once itās dialed in, it is magic.
Another upgrade I would suggest is pulling the trigger and getting the plunger kit from zebsboards. The tech used is miles ahead of the IR sensing used by VirtuaPin. If you want to simply want to use the plunger to blast the ball up on the playing field, then the default plunger in the cab is fine. But if you are trying to do skill shots, (aka pinbot or cyclone) the IR sensor method is just not consistent enough.
Zebās plunger is nearly a direct replacement as it also includes an accelerometer and 20 inputs. The use of an actual sliding pot for the plunger is much more accurate. Wiring up was easy if you have the wiring diagram for the VirtuaPin controller.
2 small caveats. First, the design of the Zebsboards does not allow you to ātwistā the plunger. If thatās a deal killer for you, then you wonāt want this. Second, the one I bought did keyboard emulation instead of straight joystick. 14 of the inputs were keyboard, 4 were controller buttons. This requires extensive remapping.
I think Zebs has a ācontrollerā based board which would do straight controller buttons, which would eliminate remapping. But it wasnāt a big deal.
For about $100 to $150 US it is like putting a subwoofer in your car. Sure you donāt āneedā it, but once youāve done it, you donāt know how you lived without it.
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@codinghorror Are you still enjoying your VirtuaPin Mini? Do you ever regret not getting the full size version? Iām a bit on the fence between the mini and full sized version.
Definitely still love it! I need to hook up Kinect support for Pinball Arcade / Arcooda, and FX3 grabbed the Williams license so things are very much alive.
If you have a large house and lots of space, sure, go with the full size version. But I like the mini version for my small California home 
@codinghorror, Iām curious if your opinion on Visual Pinball X has evolved.
I originally got into virtual pinball probably about 4 years ago with The Pinball Arcade (TPA) on the PS3. I was blown away, I couldnāt believe how accurate it seemed, how authentic the models and the colors and the lighting and the sound all seemed. But for some reason my enthusiasm dropped off, not because there is anything wrong with TPA, probably just because of life stuff.
Then about a year ago I got a new work laptop with a powerful GPU and decided to look back into virtual pinball, and thatās when I saw that TPA had lost rights to all those Bally and Williams tables and that those rights had been snatched up by Zen Studios. So I bought the Pinball FX3 first Williams/Bally pack andā¦ yup, seemed just as good if not better. But my searching of forums and also YouTubes I came across made me aware that the hardcore virtual pinball community, mostly, hates TPA and all sing the praises of Zen Studios and Pinball FX3. So I went back and played TPA (after not having played it for a few years) and I must say, I see why. The physics just donāt seem accurate in TPA, the balls move in a kind of āfloatyā way. In comparison, Pinball FX3 seems like itās being developed by people with a real passion for pinball, it just feels āhardcoreā. When I go back and play TBA it feels likeā¦ they were just resting on their laurels.
This brings me to Visual Pinball X. I looked into it a couple years ago and I couldnāt figure out how to get a table running, so I gave up. But after all the virtual pinball forum lurking I did about a year ago, I decided to give it another try because I saw so much praise for it. Long story short: Pinball FX3 gets a solid āA-ā grade from me, but Visual Pinball Xā¦ definitely a B, maybe a B+. Some tables are just great, and the weird graphics engine, which I agree seems a little ājankyā, it some cases it just seems to not matter. Have you set it up properly and played Diner? Or Indiana Jones? Or Creature from the Black Lagoon (CFTBL)? I could go on and on. Honestly I am shocked about how good some of these tables are. There is one caveat: input/flipper lag. That is a serious detriment and for that reason if there is a Pinball FX3 table available, thatās what I play over the VPX table. But for those tables that arenāt available in PFX3, they can be REALLY fun in VPX. And if you play enough you just end up subconsciously compensating for the input/flipper lag.
So I donāt think that VPX should be dismissed because of itās shortcomings. I havenāt done a side-by-side comparison, but I want to say thatā¦ for instance, CFTBL in VPX is probably better than CFTBL in TPA. But thatās probably a bad example because Zen Studios just put out CFTBL for PFX3 and it is awesome, almost certainly beats the VPX version.
To put it another way, for any given table, if it exists in all three systems, itās usually the case that PFX3 > VPX > TPA.
Hereās my challenge to you: if you have a gaming laptop (in order to avoid the complexities of setting up VPX on a cabinet), do this:
- install VPX: https://vpinball.com/VPBdownloads/categories/vpx-exes/
- install Diner: https://vpinball.com/VPBdownloads/diner-vpx/
- install Fire! (Iām a new forum user and it wonāt let me link to it)
- install Space Shuttle (same)
And give those a shot. I say to use a gaming laptop because you can just run those tables in ādesktopā mode in order to avoid having to fiddle with settings to get them running on your actual cabinet. I really think if you play those tables it will illustrate the value being provided by the Visual Pinball community, in spite of the shortcomings.
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Interesting! Long term I do hope VPX eventually catches up to the commercial ones, maybe that is inevitable over time.
Poor TPA losing their license, that basically killed their productā¦ I have the legacy licenses but they havenāt released a single table since then, have they?
I would say VPX has definitely surpassed TPA.
Check out this video of Diner in VPX:
Or Space Shuttle:
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There are only two downsides to VPX that I can see:
-
some input/flipper lag
-
because itās all volunteers creating these tables, on some tables (not all) you can detect a degree of imperfect polish
But in spite of those things, itās 100% worth it, especially if you focus on the well-built tables.
Bad Cats:
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Bad Cats is nice since thatās not availabe any other way, as well.
Um, thank you for āsavingā me money. I read this yesterday, went out and bought an oculus quest. Was in the process of collecting information to put together a virtuapin cabinet and now I just want to build that pinsim cabinet. My bank account thanks you as well.
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For posterity, here are the specs of the olā VirtuaPin Mini!
- i5-4460 CPU
- GeForce GTX 1070
- 8GB DDR3
- Samsung 850 Pro 512gb SSD
And documenting my mods to it:
- replaced the 27" table and 23" backglass LCDs with IPS models for better visibility
- added a larger DMD display which is 10.1" IPS (per above)
- removed the tilt sensor, analog plunger controller because I couldnāt get it to work reliably in Windows 10, and replaced with a generic USB arcade button controller
- added two LED strips underneath the bottom of the cabinet for bottom-facing backlighting
This machine was sent to a new home, a good one, the owner of the Pindigo pinball high score app!
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I downgraded to this
Although it is very cramped inside, even for a NUC, itās an excellent layout for pinball feel in play, kinda optimal for the amount of space it takes up! The two monitor combo is a very good one:
- 24ā 4K play field (in portrait, obviously)
- 11.3ā dmd / back glass combo 1366x768
And the dual 4ā rear firing speakers and dedicated amp gives it some oomph for tactile sound feedback.
I paired it with a phantom canyon NUC and it easily does 60fps at 4K in Pinball Arcade FX 3.
The split half backglass / half DMD works better than I thought it would. I especially like the DMD being directly above the playfield.
I had the idea I would keep the NUC inside, but it might be more convenient as an external box with 3 connectors:
- HDMI (first screen)
- DisplayPort mini (second screen)
- USB (for buttons)
Power is keyed off an active internal power strip driving the two monitors, the speaker amp, and the NUC in the control socket.
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