Although MAME is one of the most well-known, coolest emulators around, another project carrying the MAME name may be both lesser-known and cooler. VPinMAME combines the very cool Visual Pinball with MAME emulation of the dot-matrix display (DMD) on recent games. That’s the area that keeps track of the score as well as the logic for controlling the more complex parts of the table, such as when to release multiball and actual mini-games you can play with the flippers.

The VPinMAME emulation uses the MAME codebase, but obviously, you can’t play the pinball game ROMs in any standalone fashion because you need the table as an interface. By hooking up the amazing physics and layout tools of Visual Pinball to the MAME-style emulation of the DMD display, you can play pinball with relevant dot-matrix score and mini-game feedback at the same time. Smart.

The (Windows-only) installation is a little strange because VPinMAME must live in its own directory. Your Visual Pinball standalone executable is probably in C:\Program Files\Visual Pinball. When you install VPinMAME (from http://pinmame.retrogames.com/downloads.html), it should unzip into C:\VPinMAME. Run the installation program, and all should be fine and dandy for that part.

However, you will need a bunch of extra software before you can run the games. Unfortunately, since there’s no commercial release, the installation process is tricky:

Okay, it’s not that tricky. Everything’s easy with good directions, if you put your mind to it.

Before you can play an emulated game, someone has to convert it. AJ’s VPinMAME page (http://www.vpforums.com/vptables/tables.php) is one of the only really comprehensive conversion lists. It also includes download links if you register. At the time of writing, there are over 400 tables available—an amazing fan-based effort—with many more new titles and improved versions of existing games to come. These games span almost all of the post-electromechanical era, from manufacturers such as Bally, Midway, Stern, Williams, and Sega. There are also some earlier titles in there.

Although each individual dot-matrix screen type had different hardware, which meant there were several chipsets to emulate, the vast majority have support now. The approach is similar to that of MAME: bundling emulators for several individual arcade board types. The collective emulator is extremely powerful.

However, please bear in mind that not all of these tables are completely finished. The makers have spent days playing the original machines and tweaking the physics and layout so that they accurately recreate the original articles as much as possible, but many tables are still works in progress. You may be able to estimate how complete the table is by looking at the version number, but some tables are so easy that V1.0 is all they need, and some still aren’t perfect after multiple versions, so your mileage may vary! Check out the README file in ROM distributions or poke around the boards for user comments on a specific table.

In any case, it’s easy to recommend some of my favorite pinball tables of all time. Not coincidentally, they’re often the most polished, so they’re well worth checking out.

It seems that nothing’s ever entirely straightforward with VPinMAME, including loading in games. Many games are distributed in two parts, one being the table design itself and the other, the DMD ROM to run in the emulator.

When you find a table in the standard .VPT format, unzip it into the C:\VPinMAME\Tables directory. When you find the DMD ROM, probably from somewhere else entirely, put it in C:\VPinMAME\Roms without unzipping it. Then, when you load the table and play it normally (by pressing F5), it should recognize and include the VPinMAME features.

Of course, this brings about a difficult issue. At least with some emulated titles, you can own the original and feel a little more justified in playing the emulated versions. If you wanted to play five of these titles with full legality, you’d need a garage just to store the originals. Hopefully, the original pintable producers will release officially licensed ROM versions of some of these amazing emulations. In the meantime, use your discretion.