General Noob question

[yoyotheo]

Hey guys.  I’m not terribly familiar with Visual Pinball.  I understand people create custom pinball ‘tables’ out of cabinets and monitors etc, and connect them to computers full of roms of actual pinball tables .. a noob description, I know.  My question is, are these roms playable on other devices that run emulators?  Specifically, I’m modding a PS Vita with custom firmware, and I know it can run emulators of various game systems, including MAME.  As a huge fan of pinball, I know there are tons and tons of roms for this “visual pinball” system, so I was hoping maybe there will be a way to play them on the modded Vita.  Does anyone know?

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[Thalamus]

Don’t know your system. But, it would at least have to be able to run directx9 – emulated. VP is very windows centered, there are guys that have some kind of luck running the emulator in linux via wine, that is again emulating directx9 and windows.

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yoyotheo

[strikekat]

Short answer:

Unfortunately (as someone who owns a lot of devices with CFW such as a Vita, Switch, PS4), there is no current way to run Visual Pinball on any of these platforms. (Technically you can run Linux and Wine on a PS4… not worth it IMO).
The closest you’re going to get right now is Pinball Arcade and Zen Pinball. (RIP Pinball Arcade’s Williams license, but you already have a hacked system, so there’s technically a way around that   )

Technical Answer:

Like Thalamus said, VPX is very much a Windows-centric program, and pretty much will only run on Windows itself or on Linux via Wine.

Additionally, the Vita (and Switch) are ARM platforms, not x86 like a standard desktop computer running Windows, so not only is it the wrong operating system, but the wrong processor architecture – another hoop that would have to be jumped through.

The thing to understand about Visual Pinball is that it is actually composed of two parts: (a fork of) MAME, and Visual Pinball itself (the physical table you interact with). MAME does not actually display or manage the pinball table that you see and interact with.. the ROMs that MAME play are just programs that runs the game code, plays the sounds, and displays the score displays + DMD on the backbox that you see.

Visual Pinball displays a fully modeled (by the community) pinball table that sends and receives signals from this ROM and shows results on the table. Think of the pinball table as basically a giant interactive controller with dozens of buttons on top of the MAME rom.

So even though MAME itself has been ported to numerous systems, and you could probably get a pinball ROM by itself to start playing, it’s essentially useless without the whole digitally modeled pinball table to go alongside it.

I hope that answers some questions.

 

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[yoyotheo]

Thanks a bunch, Thalamus and strikekat.  I’m pretty ignorant about this stuff, and a lot of your replies wasn’t quite grasped here, but I gather that what I was hoping for cannot be done.  I’ll definitely have to get a visual pinball table one of these days.  They certainly look like tons of fun.  And yes, there are pinball options on the modded PS Vita, not only Zen Pinball but there have been various tables and collections of tables released on Vita, PSP, PS1, NES, SNES, GBA, etc., all of which are playable on this thing.  I was just excited by the thought of playing all those tons of marvelous tables you guys have!

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