"A Dev Pinhead Without A Pet Project..."

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You rang?

Greetings, and welcome!

This is just a quick introduction to a new project that I’ve got up on GitHub and a handful of other projects that I’ve forked in support of it.

First off, the main project is called Unreal-Visual-Pinball and it’s a plugin that works as an intermediary between VPinMAME (a Pinball Machine ROM emulator), and Unreal Engine.

The original project was started by Data Sung. He had posted about the project and I contacted him to ask if I could collaborate. I quickly converted the PinMAME portion of his game project into a plugin, and started fleshing out more PinMAME APIs. We currently have the project up as a co-owned github project. There is more to be done and collaborators are welcome.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the various forks and what they all do:

Unreal-Visual-Pinball

This is the Unreal Plugin project. It currently focuses just on the interface between Unreal and the PinMAME APIs but I think this could be fleshed out into a larger virtual pinball toolkit with Plugin Blueprint, mesh, and material content to help out with implementing things like DMDs, LED Scoreboards, example switch/solenoid interactions, etc.

PinMAME-vs2019

Visual PinMAME is the emulator that runs the ROMs. VPinMAME runs as a Windows COM object and implements things like button presses and game code, outputting light on/off signals, solenoid signals, DMD/scoreboard output, audio, and etc. The rom is basically the electronic brains of the pinball machine, and VPinMAME runs that code.

This particular fork is setup to compile easily in Visual Studio 2019 - The parent project doesn’t compile directly as set up, so this fork is just easier to use.

Disclaimer: Many Pinball ROMS are copyrighted and protected by law. We are in no way promoting or supporting piracy. This is an educational project. We love and support the pinball community, the artwork, the history, and the creativity that goes into these games.

FreeWPC

FreeWPC is a compiler for building pinball ROMs. This is an old project that hasn’t been touched in a over a decade. In order to use it you first need to build a custom version of gcc in linux. The only problem is that to do so you have to patch the old gcc and rebuild it from scratch, but it’s so old that current versions of c++ don’t support it (at least this is my belief right now). This may just be a matter of the right compiler flags or it may be a matter of rolling back to an older version of Ubuntu to get it built. With this working, we could build custom ROMs and perhaps come up with some very simple starting point examples. (For an historically simple project, I think putting together a version of the Bally’s prototype 1975 Flicker game would be a good project.)

VPinball

Visual Pinball is an application that can be used to build and play virtual pinball machines. It uses VPinMAME, and I’ve been using it to educate myself on how to implement and work with VPinMAME.

PinballEventProtocol

This is a project by GitHub’s tmek. It looks like he’s done a good deal of this same type of work, but his pinball projects may have stopped after an unsuccessful Kickstarter. I really like his VPinMAMETest project in here and I think seeing something like that implemented would be helpful in wiring up all the required switches/lights/solenoids.

pinball-construction-kit

This is a playable copy of a pinball simulator, as an Unreal Project, put out by Epic Games Japan at UnrealFest 2015. It runs as a code project, but it has a lot of elements that might be worth scavenging for putting together an example game.

So, there are a lot of random bits and pieces here, but I think there’s some pretty interesting possibilities. Unreal Engine provides an open-world playground for all this, so you could be using it to build virtual playable tables, or to run real-world physical tables, or some combination in between… AR/VR implementations, multiplayer, etc. You could even make a pinball designer as a tool/game in and of itself, ala Cine Tracer / Roblox, etc.

I think it’s pretty crazy the different directions something like this could go and I think pinball is such a great combination of classic and modern gaming that it could be just plain fun to work with.