I went to judge.
For the past year, I'd been building a virtual pinball machine in my basement. Like the world's nerdiest hot-rod, the project consumed my weekend hours with tinkering, tuning, wiring, and occasionally testing. But it was done, and thanks to the hard work of countless unpaid open-source programmers, artists, physicists, hobbyists, line chefs, and pinball nuts, I had 30 virtual tables running in a simulator.
But like a hot-rod dude, I longed to know how my rig would do in the real world, foot against the firewall. A few of the tables in my cabinet were classics I remembered from pool halls and arcades of the past: Twilight Zone, Addams Family, Black Knight. But honestly, it had been years since I'd been in front of a well-maintained pinball table, much less all 30 of the ones I could run in the basement. So I made the pilgrimage to Pinball Wizard, to see just how close the virtual pinball experience had come to the "real thing."
The answer is, "Very."
This comes as no surprise to Noah Fentz. A 40-year-old executive chef from Southeast Michigan, Fentz runs VPForums.org, the de facto home base for virtual pinball nerds. "In the last couple years, especially, the progress the community has made is just staggering," he explains. And a community project it is. Virtual Pinball -- a recreation of classic tables, as opposed to the excellent original games like PinballFX by Zen Studios -- requires the enthusiast to bolt together disparate pieces of hardware and software to emulate the tables of the past.
At the core is Visual Pinball, a pinball table editing and presentation system. To build a table in Visual Pinball, you start with artwork. Across the world, legions of pinball diehards meticulously scan the original playfields, backboxes, and plastic bits of real-world tables and import them into the Visual Pinball system. Separately, another enthusiast carefully extracts the original ROM code from the machine in question (assuming the table was modern enough to have a chip in it). That ROM gets emulated like an arcade game in MAME, through a separate piece of software called Visual PinMAME. Finally, someone has to write a complex script to tie everything together, down to the last detail of how the plunger works -- and what to do when two balls collide.
If that sounds like a giant mish-mash of hard work and questionable quality control, you're right. This is not a simulator in the way Forza Motorsport 3 is, where you just step on the gas and go. It's a labor of love, like building that proverbial car in the garage. But the end result -- a big, physical cabinet with real pinball buttons, a plunger, a digital display, a backbox, big speakers, and force-feedback solenoids and motors -- is strikingly real. Fentz agrees: "This boom of homebrew virtual pinball cabinets, it took a giant leap in realism. That trend will continue well into the future."
My cabinet project started small, before spiraling out of control. The computer driving it used spare Core Duo parts. It's now an i7 with two high-end Nvidia cards driving three screens: 40 inches for the playfield, 19 inches for the digital display, and 32 inches for the backbox art. The "I'll just slam some wood together" cabinet became a complete 200-pound pinball cabinet and backbox, with parts ordered from pinball supply houses like Marco Specialties and PBResource.
But I really lost my mind when I decided I needed the real "thump" of the pop-bumpers, slingshots, and flippers. This required a legion of car-starter solenoids, automotive relays, a USB controller board originally designed for giving computers controls of external LEDs, and a lot of wiring, solder, and troubleshooting. Finally, an accelerometer (also USB) lets you actually nudge the ball by manhandling the cabinet... or, if you're heavy-handed, push it too far and tilt the simulator.
The end result is staggeringly real; every hit of the ball resonates in your hands. The simulation is rounded out by an old windshield wiper motor to power the actual moving, vibrating parts, and LED strobes placed atop the cabinet. The overall illusion of a real table is Disney-level, with nary an uncanny pinball valley in sight.
That fidelity does comes at a price. I'm afraid to tally up the real cost of my nerd hot-rod, but it's north of $2,000. It takes a beefy PC, a lot of specialized hardware, a big flatscreen TV, two monitors, and a whole lot of fiddling. But it's cheaper than the $3,000-$6,000 to buy a premade virtual pinball machine from Fentz's VirtuaPin cabinet-making company (just add software!).
Not everyone thinks all this emulation is a good idea. While the intellectual property right issues are cleaner than they are for MAME (most pinball companies have tacitly agreed not to sue), that doesn't mean they think it's any good. "The simulators have nothing to do with pinball," says Gary Stern of Stern Pinball, the last remaining pinball manufacturer. "I don't think it's pinball at all. It's not the right experience."
Tim Arnold, the curator of the Pinball Hall of Fame in Las Vegas, agrees. "Pinball can only exist in the real world," he claims. "There's never going to be a real video simulation of pinball. It's still just a blip on a screen."
When I hear this, I want to invite them to my house for an evening. When the bumpers are popping, the lights are flashing, and I'm deep in a multiball-fueled high score run, I'm convinced they're wrong. It's not perfect -- no simulation ever is. But it's close.
Julian Murdoch is a relatively well-adjusted freelance writer, living in the woods of New England with his wife, two kids, a dog, and a pinball machine.
Spy Guy says: Pinball fanatics, how do you think a virtual table stacks up against the real thing?
