New Pi 4 and Virtual Pinball?

PCKid

Could this now be possible? Pi 3 is too slow but is there enough grunt to run a decent Pinball emulator?

MetalManTN

@PCKid unfortunately nothing seems possible on the Pi 4 right now, and I'm not just taking about RetroPie either. The devs that work on Lakka can't seem to get that software working correctly on the Pi 4 either. I've had my 4GB Pi 4 mainly just sitting around unused for the better part of a month, with the exception of testing out some of the nightly builds of Lakka. There are no builds of RetroPie to test, and there is almost zero communication about what the issues are that are preventing these softwares from working. I wish I had the skills and knowledge to help the devs, but sadly I don't and so I just sit here and wait and constantly refresh the commits page to see if any progress has been made. I have no clue when anything other than Raspbian will work on our Pi 4s.

KN4THX

@MetalManTN I too have an unused Pi 4 I bought early out of excitement and thinking I'd have more free time to play with it (which school seems to disagree with). I put my Pi 4 next to my 3B+ and shook my finger at it and told it if it doesn't start smoothing out some N64 it's going to get demoted to dashcam project duty.

@PCKid On the pinball front, there are some awesome options from my teen years that may tide you over. Epic Pinball runs in dosbox and was a pretty fun game. Not quite the same experience as some of the modern applications you may be wishing for but back in the day Epic Pinball was all the rage and in my opinion still is. Pinball Dreams is one I've wanted to try recently and it seems to run on the Amiga,DOS, and SNES. It's supposedly did well enough to spawn sequels as well.

BobHarris

@KN4THX Pro pinball Timeshock is pretty much the best virtual pinball game ever and it runs quite good on the Pi 3 (only thing that could be a bit better is the smoothness of the ball movement). But it does take a bit of skill to get it to work (Dosbox).

KN4THX

@BobHarris I will have to check that out. Is it a top down/scrolling table?

BobHarris

@KN4THX No it's one with depth:

KN4THX

@BobHarris Wow that looks really awesome! I still have Epic Pinball burned in my brain but I am going to have to check this out!!!

BobHarris

@KN4THX It really is. It also is a very complex table, I still enjoy playing it to this day.
It is a long read, but if you want to get it running, all the answers are in here:
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/4783/howto-pro-pinball-timeshock-in-dosbox-on-rpi3

JamieP

A year on and still there seems to be nothing to emulate pinball using a Pi :(

Keep looking on other forums too and they are all very PC centered and seem to require stupid amounts of CPU / GPU to run. This I can only put down to bad emulation as there have been Pinball games on systems going waaaay back.

Keep hoping for a coding genius to do a port as the dual displays on a PI 4 would be great.

I may have to have a look at the code myself, how hard can it be... Ha HA ha

sirhenrythe5th

In fact the pinball games are simulated, the only things emulated are the ICs containing the data for the Dot-Matrix-Displays, the sound and FX, the main control unit and the scoring system.
I had a lot of fun in the early 2000s using VisualPinball in conjunction with PinMAME.
But i doubt this, or Future Pinball, will be ported to the Raspberry Pi or Linux in general in the near future.

JamieP

Just found there is work going on with Unity, so maybe not Pi but breaking the need for Windows is a great thing

https://www.vpforums.org/index.php?showtopic=43651

akamming

@JamieP said in New Pi 4 and Virtual Pinball?:

A year on and still there seems to be nothing to emulate pinball using a Pi :(

Keep looking on other forums too and they are all very PC centered and seem to require stupid amounts of CPU / GPU to run. This I can only put down to bad emulation as there have been Pinball games on systems going waaaay back.

Keep hoping for a coding genius to do a port as the dual displays on a PI 4 would be great.

I may have to have a look at the code myself, how hard can it be... Ha HA ha

I made an arcade cabinet using a PI 4. I included pinball flipper buttons on the side. Having a lot of fun with amiga pinball games (Pinball Dreams, Fantasies, Illusions, Slam Tilt, etc..) on lr-puae. These are not as realistic as virtual pinball, but are a lot of fun to play and give the real pinball vibe.

I also installed davids midnight magic with lr-vice. Still a fun game to play real memory lane game for the c64.

On lr-pcsx2-rearmed you can play several pinball games.

and the most realistic pinball simulators on the pi4 as far as i have seen are williams pinball classic and gottlieb pinball classics on ppsspp emulator.

JamieP

Yes I have also several other Pinball games both on real systems and emulation (currently playing Zen Pinball 2 on a PS3). But what I would love is a real vpinball cab, maybe I'll just have to bite the bullet and build a fast Windows machine for it

GtBFilms

@jamiep someone released an SD card image for an rpi 4 running Zen Pinball on Android today.

Unfortunately it was pulled in hours due to containing some commercial tables. Hopefully it will be rereleased soon with the free table and ability to purchase additional ones from Zen.

Seems to run pretty well.

LandyVlad

@akamming said in New Pi 4 and Virtual Pinball?:

I made an arcade cabinet using a PI 4. I included pinball flipper buttons on the side. Having a lot of fun with amiga pinball games (Pinball Dreams, Fantasies, Illusions, Slam Tilt, etc..) on lr-puae. These are not as realistic as virtual pinball, but are a lot of fun to play and give the real pinball vibe.

I also installed davids midnight magic with lr-vice. Still a fun game to play real memory lane game for the c64.

On lr-pcsx2-rearmed you can play several pinball games.

and the most realistic pinball simulators on the pi4 as far as i have seen are williams pinball classic and gottlieb pinball classics on ppsspp emulator.

Genius !!!!