VISUAL PINMAME/VISUAL PINBALL - OVERVIEW

Visual PinMAME is a fantastic program which, in conjunction with the equally fantastic Visual Pinball, enables you to accurately simulate the look, sound and gameplay of a number of real arcade pinball tables. To be more exact, Visual PinMAME precisely emulates the workings of the machine's CPU (including sound effects and the dot-matrix scoreboard display), and Visual Pinball enables a facsimile of the table to be created to reproduce the physical aspects of the machine, like the movement of the ball. However, achieving this terrific goal is mildly tricky if you don't know what you're doing (the included documentation files assume a heck of a lot, and it took me an entire day to painstakingly gather all the required information together from about five different sources), so if you're a bit confused, then follow this simple step-by-step guide.

RECOMMENDED SPECIFICATIONS

Visual Pinball itself (without the PinMAME aspect) will run happily on a relatively humble PC. However, to use it in conjunction with Visual PinMAME for true arcade accuracy, you'll need something a bit beefier. The combination is just about playable full-screen with default settings on my P2-400 with 128MB of RAM, but for really smooth running I'd suggest a 600MHz CPU is the least you should be aiming for. However, you can substantially increase the speed by disabling samples on the in-game menu which appears when you press the "F1" key (this doesn't actually make any difference to the sound as far as I can tell - you still get to hear all the effects, music, speech etc), or by reducing the screen size.

GETTING STARTED - A BEGINNER'S GUIDE

1. Download a copy of Visual Pinball. The latest version can always be found at the homepage, or can be found here.

2. Unzip the file into a directory, and run the "SETUP.EXE" file, which will install the program.

2A- IF YOU ONLY WANT TO PLAY VISUAL PINBALL -(tables without roms)-STOP HERE! * ! * ! JUST OPEN UP THE PROGRAM AND SELECT FILE-OPEN-the table you want to play.VPT and then TABLE-PLAY and voila! THE DEFAULTS TO START MOST GAMES ARE 5 TO INSERT COIN- 1 TO USE CREDIT (and start often) -S to Start (Sometimes).

3. Download a copy of VpinMAME. The latest version can similarly be found at the homepage, or downloaded from here. If you go to the homepage, be careful not to download a copy of "normal" PinMAME by mistake. (Caught me out the first time...)

4. Unzip this file into your visual pinball directory.

5. When you've unzipped VpinMAME, you should see a file called "Setup" Double-click the file to run it. You should get a message telling you that VPINMAME.DLL has successfully been entered into the registry. If you have the latest version of VpinMAME (1.11), you can also now double-click the SETUP.EXE file for some rather easier configuration options than previously.

6. Now create a new folder inside your VPINMAME/Vpinball directory, and call it ROMS.

7. You'll now need to get the ROMs for the emulator, and the Visual Pinball table file. You can get these from the Downloads page.

8. Unzip the table file into the TABLES folder inside your VPINBALL directory.

9. Create a new folder inside your VPINMAME\ROMS directory, with the same name as the first part of the zip file, ie if the zipfile is called "TZ_94H.ZIP", call the folder "TZ_94H". Unzip the ROMs file into this folder. (Note: You should also be able to simply place the zipfile into the ROMS directory without unzipping it, but I had trouble getting it to work this way.)

10. You're now ready to go. Start Visual Pinball, and open the table file. Follow the on-screen instructions and get ready to play.