Pinball emulator?

[GiraffeeDreams]

The title says it all, are there any pinball emulators planned or in development for the Pandora?


Just seen an article on hackaday.com about a mini virtual pinball table and remember playing the Addams Family pinball back home until I ran out of cash and I'd love to play again.


I imagine touch screen controls like the iOS or android pinball games, or the buttons, playing with the pandora on its side.


Any thoughts on this?

 

[ekianjo]

This is probably not really a pinball emulator per se, rather a pinball game, but I really recommend "Pinball Dreams" on the Amiga Emulator UAE4All. It's one of the best pinball games ever made.

 

[Wally]

Addams family pinball rules.. i wonder if they'll include that in Pinball Arcade one day?

 

[EvilDragon]

Well, some Pinball Construction set would be neat.


I'd love to great some tables myself, and other users from the community could also create tables


Shouldn't be too hard, should it?


Basic system should involve collissions, bumpers, physics, scrolling... and that's it.


With that, some basic tables could be created.


When that has been done, it could be further improved to support variables and events so you could create tables like in the 80s/90s.


Then add a second floor and pipes... and that's it.


The basic version shouldn't be too hard to code, any further development would improve stuff and give you the possibility to create new tables.


It's sad that VisualPinball is a beast to port (uses so many Windows-Related stuff), as then we'd have all we need.


We'd only need the VisualPinball Player, the Editor can be used on the PC to create the tables.

 

[GiraffeeDreams]

I heard there is a version of MAME that does pinball tables, seen a few instructbles about hat too, I'll see if I can dig something up and hopefully find something open source.

 

[mcobit]

If you mean PinMAME, it emulates only the roms of the tables with scoring and gamelogic. Not the tables.


This is used with visual pinball to get the best experience by emulating the original tables software.

 

[Trip]

Emilia Pinball could do with some love and it comes with it's own editor too

 

[I8NY]

Emilia Pinball could do with some love and it comes with it's own editor too

I have played that pinball game a couple times when I got from the Ubuntu software center. I don't have it anymore because of a OS reinstall but it was fun to play.

 

[b_o_b]

Only Visual Pinball is capable of doing near real pinball emulation currently. I don't agree with ED that creating an emulator is easy. The authors of VP have been perfecting the physics for years and although they are close they are still not capable of copying the exact physics of a pinball.


There is also Future Pinball. That has great graphics and is a fantastic program as well but lacks in the physics area.


Currently there is an experiment with Unity 3D in combination with Future Pinball and pinmame that looks very impressive and will probably give the best non-commercial pinball simulation.


All of these require a pretty good PC and Windows. The only thing that is open source and not require closed source libraries or programs is Pinmame (the rom of the table).


Emilia was promising but unfortunately never really supported and development stopped for a long time. You now have 2 not really interesting pinball tables. They had quite reasonable physics though, so a port to the pandora including the editor might be nice.


http://pinball.git.s...a=log;h=b3469fe


Seems like they even added a new table in the development space..


If you want to play realistic pinball simulation on your pandora now look for the PSX Pro Pinball tables.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/pWvqAJz0g_A?feature=oembed
Very good physics and play pretty good on r14 of PCSX ReARM

 

[GiraffeeDreams]

believe me I've be whipping Pro Pinball, True Pinball and Extreme Pinball a lot on PCSX

 

[aszu]

Has anyone tried Slam Tilt for Amiga? That`s the best one i have ever played!

 

[Ian J]

Future Pinball?


http://www.futurepinball.com/

 

[mcobit]

Future Pinball is not open source, as stated above.

 

[NoeleyC]

Has anyone tried Slam Tilt for Amiga? That`s the best one i have ever played!

Still not working on the Pandora sadly, as none of the emulators yet support AGA and A1200, but it is indeed a great game (better than the AGA Pinball Illusions I think)

 

[john4p]

For the Amiga AGA pinball games Slam Tilt and Pinball Illusions there are also perfect ports for MS-DOS available. The DOS-version of Pinball Illusions even has an exclusive table (Vikings).


They should run fullspeed in QEmu and dosbox (but I don't know if 100% smooth scrolling is possible with qemu or dosbox).


The DOS version of Pinball Fantasies is perfect, too, and has more colors than the Amiga OCS/ECS version (I guess the DOS version is identical in gfx to Pinball Fantasies AGA).


The DOS version of Pinball Dreams is a terrible port though with broken physics - avoid!


Because of its music the Amiga original of Pinball Dreams is my favorite out of these 4 games.


I remember Psycho Pinball for DOS being a lot of fun, too.

 

[ekianjo]

For the Amiga AGA pinball games Slam Tilt and Pinball Illusions there are also perfect ports for MS-DOS available. The DOS-version of Pinball Illusions even has an exclusive table (Vikings).


They should run fullspeed in QEmu and dosbox (but I don't know if 100% smooth scrolling is possible with qemu or dosbox).

I doubt the music on the DOS version was as good as on the Amiga... need to confirm probably.


And even if you get good scrolling on the DOS version, I don't think it will ever be as smooth as on the Amiga hardware either. Not at that time in the PC-era, as far as I can recall. But I could be wrong about Pinball Illusions on PC.

 

[john4p]

I remember Pinball Fantasies with Soundblaster Pro sounding almost as good on Amiga (just not quite as clear) and the scrolling being fine. But that was 17 years ago and maybe it really wasn't perfectly smooth.


Never played the dos versions of Slam Tilt and Pinball Illusions.


Still would definitely be worth testing on Pandora with qemu/dosbox.

 

[Prometheus]

I remember Psycho Pinball for DOS being a lot of fun, too.

I have the Mega Drive version of this - it runs great in PicoDrive. I have no idea if the MS-DOS version is any different, but I certainly highly recommend the Mega Drive version.

 

[john4p]

Ah, just read the Mega Drive version is the original and has better minigames than the PC version. Will try this later.

 

[GiraffeeDreams]

I'll give it a go, I still play Dragons Fury on the MD, only ever completed all the objectives once.