Visual Pinball

Visual Pinball is a program that allows programmers to create and play 3-D renditions of pinball machines on a home computer. It is unlike any pinball simulation program made previously in terms of realistic graphics and physics. This gives pinball players an opportunity to play renditions of real pinball machines that they might not otherwise ever be able to in real life.

Visual Pinball was started in February 2001 by programmer Randy Davis. Visual Pinball is roughly based on the Microsoft Visual Basic programming language for relative ease of programming, but the program itself is written in C++ with ATL (which helps in making ActiveX controls). Unfortunately, this also currently limits Visual Pinball to running on modern Windows PCs; Visual Pinball is not currently known to work with WINE, the Windows compatibility layer for Linux.

Visual Pinball can be seen as an important step in the evolution of pinball-based entertainment, especially as the availability of publicly playable machines has shrunk and currently only one manufacturer of real pinball machines (Stern Pinball, Inc.) exists today. As of 2003, there are hundreds of pinball machines that have been rendered for Visual Pinball. Modern pinball machines (especially those made after 1990) usually require the Visual PinMAME program in order to work.

External links

• Official Visual Pinball website (http://www.randydavis.com/vp/)
• Tower of Pin's Pinball Simulation History (http://www.pcpinball.com/history/index.html)