Pinball emulator/games ?

Escher86

Is there any possibility to insert a emulator system for pinball games ? Would be a great addition to the Retropie!

celly

@Escher86 A port of Future Pinball or Visual Pinball would be slick! However, the minimum specs to run either of those I'm sure rpi3 isn't capable of running it.

opensourcefan

I've run FP and VP in a cab and let me tell ya, no pie is going to run either of them, not yet. My last system (cab) before I took it all apart was a dual xeon with a gtx560 and whole pile of ram and it struggled. FP needs more than VP but the simulation on both really suffers with low performance. Great idea, sure would be a lot of fun though.

opensourcefan

I had FP running on my Ubuntu desktop for fun as well once, used wine to run it. It's not the best test for efficiency but might be worth a try to see what the pi3 can actually do. Just need to find a distro that wine will play nice with.

GtBFilms

Wondering if Pinball Illusions/Pinball Dreams/Pinball Fantasies under Amiga emulation might be the best option at present? Although when I built my picade with Retropie on it, my intention was just to have something that could run old classics such as pacman and asteroids, of course now I can see what it can do, I'm missing a decent pinball emulation option too.

Future Pinball would be amazing, but even my PC struggles with that on some tables.

suprjami

Some combination of Illusions/Dreams/Fantasies are on SNES, Mega Drive, and DOS as well.

These would be ideal DOSBox games to drive with a controller on the Pi as they use few keys, so you can map the required keys to buttons.

dankcushions

the pro pinball games on the ps1 were great.

there was a trilogy collection on the dreamcast that will probably be better but who knows how reicast copes...

plateofshrimp

The GOG release of Pro Pinball - Timeshock! runs on the RPi3 after some tweaking with the files. I can post notes if anyone could use them.

See video of it in action!

Well, it would be more action-y if i was actually playing... and there is sound but my phone didn't capture it.

Pyjamarama

Plz do! :)

FAB2TB

Hi Plateofshrimp, I d really appreciate if you help us how to run the Pro pinball roms coz I had no success at all using the Pi3, same thing with the Pro Pinball Trilogy for Dreamcast which launched but crashed very soon before to start playing :/

backstander

@Escher86
Pro Pinball on the PSX, Dreamcast and DOS sound like they're the best pinball games on the Pi but if you're wanting a more retro graphics pinball experience, I'd recommend games from the Crush Pinball series. I have Alien Crush (1988) for my TG16 and it was fun back in the day.

Also another pinball game if you like 80's metal hair bands is Crüe Ball

A friend of mine in high school was a huge Mötley Crüe fan and he had this game for his Genesis lol.

plateofshrimp

@backstander true true that is truly retro.

The Timeshock! HOWTO is posted as a separate topic in the Help section.

FAB2TB

@backstander thx you !! I didnt know it these one are very fun
@plateofshrimp thx a lot for the tricks I will try it with the PC version coz I only have the PSX one at the moment

backstander

I decided to give the Pro Pinball games a try and I had the same issue as @FAB2TB with the Dreamcast version of Pro Pinball Trilogy and never got it to work.

Pro Pinball (The Web) for PSX played okay with the lr-pcsx-rearmed emulator but I couldn't get the other three, Pro Pinball: Big Race USA, Pro Pinball: Fantastic Journey and Pro Pinball: Timeshock!, to work with lr-pcsx-rearmed. So I installed the other non-Libretro PSX emulator pcsx-rearmed (which I had never tried before) and they worked but I had trouble getting this emulator to find my PSX BIOS file(s) and to save the controller mapping. After about an hour of trial & error I figured out how to get it all working.

First of all, pcsx-rearmed looks for the BIOS files in your ~/bios/ folder so I just made a symbolic link to the correct file location:

ln -s /home/pi/RetroPie/BIOS/SCPH1001.BIN ~/bios/

Second, it thinks your pcsx.cfg file is in ~/.pcsx/ folder and if you try to pass it the "-cfg" argument, it will always put ~/.pcsx/ before it. So the default value of /opt/retropie/configs/psx/emulators.cfg has something like -cfg /opt/retropie/configs/psx/pcsx.cfg and when you run it, it tries to load up ~/.pcsx//opt/retropie/configs/psx/pcsx.cfg which doesn't exist. To fix this I had to make a small change in emulators.cfg:

cp /opt/retropie/configs/psx/pcsx.cfg ~/.pcsx/cfg/pcsx.cfg
nano /opt/retropie/configs/psx/emulators.cfg

pcsx-rearmed = "/opt/retropie/emulators/pcsx-rearmed/pcsx -cfg cfg/pcsx.cfg -cdfile %ROM%"

Last, I have a wireless Xbox 360 controller using the xpad driver so I added this to my controller mapping:

nano ~/.pcsx/cfg/pcsx.cfg

binddev = sdl:Xbox 360 Wireless Receiver (XBOX)
bind backspace = Fast Forward
bind \xAA = Enter Menu
bind \xA0 = player1 CROSS
bind \xA1 = player1 SQUARE
bind \xA2 = player1 CIRCLE
bind \xA3 = player1 TRIANGLE
bind \xA4 = player1 L1
bind \xA5 = player1 R1
bind \xA6 = player1 L2
bind \xA7 = player1 R2
bind \xA8 = player1 SELECT
bind \xA9 = player1 START
bind \xAB = player1 L3
bind \xAC = player1 R3
bind up = player1 UP
bind down = player1 DOWN
bind right = player1 RIGHT
bind left = player1 LEFT
bind f1 = Save State
bind f2 = Load State
bind f3 = Prev Save Slot
bind f4 = Next Save Slot
bind f5 = Toggle Frameskip
bind f6 = Take Screenshot
bind f7 = Show/Hide FPS
bind f8 = Switch Renderer
bind f11 = Toggle fullscreen

The above will use the Guide button on my Xbox 360 controller to open the Menu so I can save & loads states, make configuration changes and (most importantly) exit the emulator so now I don't need an attached keyboard.

Rookervik

There are some open-source linux pinball games that might be able to be ported.

Nexus Pinball: https://love2d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=81018
Emilia Pinball: https://sourceforge.net/projects/pinball/
Linball: http://linball.sourceforge.net/

There are some others. Also, these need some graphical love. I might be able to help.

All of the Pinball Dreams, Pinball Fantasies, Epic Pinball and Extreme Pinball run fantastic on a Raspberry Pi 2. Gameboy advance has several great pinball games, as does Playstation and even Nintendo if you know where to look.

Don't forget that PSP runs quite well on Pi2 overclocked and Pi3 standard.