Klopjero Posted September 20, 2020 Share Posted September 20, 2020 Hi, are there plans for integrating/adding Pinball emulator systems to the DB? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ItchyRobot Posted September 20, 2020 Share Posted September 20, 2020 I am not sure, but last I heard they looked into it, but found the constantly changing table names to be a barrier. For example, the tables are always being updated and modded by different artists, giving them nice upgrades, but also changing the name of the table launch file. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Carr Posted September 21, 2020 Share Posted September 21, 2020 Yes, we've considered this. We actually looked into building pinball into LaunchBox and Big Box properly, but found that it's unfortunately a whole lot more messy than dealing with games, so we felt like we couldn't build a good solution without reinventing the wheel, or without a year of research. It's not off the table for the future, but man, it's a mess out there. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ItchyRobot Posted September 21, 2020 Share Posted September 21, 2020 (edited) 1 hour ago, Jason Carr said: Yes, we've considered this. We actually looked into building pinball into LaunchBox and Big Box properly, but found that it's unfortunately a whole lot more messy than dealing with games, so we felt like we couldn't build a good solution without reinventing the wheel, or without a year of research. It's not off the table for the future, but man, it's a mess out there. It's good to hear you are still interested in it. I can see how it would be a bear to incorporate into Launchbox/BigBox. Your best bet would probably be to start a collection yourself, learning how all the pieces fit and all the options available to the user. Otherwise, trying to learn from only us in the forums could be confusing. I know I couldn't wrap my head around all the pieces until I finally dove in and learned by trial and error, and also a lot of help from people in this forum and the VPX forums (vpforums.org and vpinball.com). A lot of us around here play in a simpler to set up desktop view, but many others play in portrait mode with multiple monitors. Visual Pinball X is one of those emulation hobbies that allows you to either go fairly simple with desktop view table emulation... or all the way up to creating a life sized pinball table having 3 or 4 monitors (playfield, backglass, DMD, video topper). If you want to research a (pinball specific) frontend that most hardcore virtual pinball players use, see PinUP. I have yet to use it, since it is not necessary for simple desktop gameplay and 99% of the tables. But some of the newest tables that have a ton of video trigger bells and whistles require it since the artist that created it wanted to display it that way. Like I said PinUP is not necessary for 99% of the tables, but it's frontend structure may give you some ideas. https://www.nailbuster.com/wikipinup/doku.php If you have any questions, feel free to ask. I have been playing around with the VPX Pinball stuff for a couple years now. And there are a handfull of other active people in here that are helpfull with this stuff too. You may have noticed that I did not mention Future Pinball. That is another popular free pinball engine, but no longer supported, as the dev gave up and did not open source his code. VPX-Visual Pinball X is still very active/open source, and arguably the best pinball physics. Edited September 21, 2020 by ItchyRobot 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JaysArcade Posted September 23, 2020 Share Posted September 23, 2020 Yep. Pinup, Pinball X, and Pinball Y are the major frontend players in virtual pinball. I agree with Jason. Its a big mess to deal with. Maybe he can invest some time in it when he has run out of other ideas for Launchbox/Bigbox. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tackett1980 Posted April 29, 2021 Share Posted April 29, 2021 (edited) FYI. You can add pinball fx through steam as well as other steam pinball titles and Import them via steam importer. I did this to my Arcade1up and have my DMD above on the marquee, a ball launch button and side flippers. Nudge is completed with both player 1 and player 2 joysticks and actually works pretty nice. These two pics I don’t have images of the pinball on the screen but you can see the flipper buttons on the side and the ball launch is under the extended control deck. edit: two more shots one where you can see the DMD and the other you can see the ball lunch button with the old control deck. It’s in the same location the extended control deck just covers it slightly. Edited April 29, 2021 by Tackett1980 Added pictures Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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