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Two places any pinball lover reading this should visit on the web: www.futurepinball.com/ and http://www.randydavis.com/vp/intro.htm . Future Pinball is easier to set up and use, though VP offers more tables. You can also build your own if you're so inclined in either one. Pretty neat stuff!

http://www.randydavis.com/vp/
http://www.vpforums.com/forum/index.php
VP + Vpinmame is real cool!
VP lets build your own pinball games.

You can download various tables and emulate most pinball games, including many favorite Williams tables, such as Indiana Jones, and Star Trek the Next Generation, and Addams Family. These were classics, and the emulation is very good.

You need Vpinmame and Visual Pinball working together. It's a little complicated to get setup, but it works well. You then need to download table files.

There are some good sites on how to make them work together, but I don't want to slashdot them.

Speaking of running Windows viruses... is there an existing tool to run VBS scripts under Linux?

I know, the last thing Linux needs is another scripting language, and VBS is such a horrible abomination.

The one non-viral use of VBS scripts I have seen is Visual Pinball.

There has been some talk of making a similar pinball simulation for Linux, but one of the major obstacles is that there are already hundreds of pinball games already simulated in Visual Pinball, by dozens of authors, and they all use VBS scripting (as required by Visual Pinball). This is required to interact with the PinMAME emulator (for modern games) or to implement the entire logic of the game (for old games that did not use a computer). It would be nearly impossible to get everybody to rewrite their tables again from scratch!

If Visual Pinball is ever ported to Linux, it would be necessary to write a VBS script interpreter for Linux (assuming one doesn't already exist). Heavily sandboxed, of course!

1: This story got posted at fark.com
2: If you need a pinball fix, go get Visual Pinball Yet another reason to dual-boot your pc to Linux/Windoze.

Have you played Visual Pinball? It is a modern equivalent of Pinball Construction Set, with a 3-D table appearance, supporting ramps and multiple levels and such. It uses VBS (gasp) as the scripting language... the first non-viral use of VBS that I've ever seen!

Unfortunately there is no way to make a standalone player yet. It is a free program (closed source), but it runs only on Windows, and the author has plans to take it commercial someday so get it while you can.

http://www.randydavis.com/vp/
http://www.vpforums.com/

I loved Pinball Construction Set, and made several Apple ][ disks full of games. Bill Budge recently did a very wonderful thing: he declared all of his past Apple ][ games to be in the public domain! A great thing, and I wish more authors of classic software would do the same.

One of the more interesting projects done with VP is to recreate arcade pinball machines; you can even hook up a special embedded version of MAME to emulate the LED display.

Pinball Construction Set did not require the game to play the pinball tables. I know - I released a half dozen or so pinball games out into the BBS scene of the time and you could download them and play them without PCS. I even saw them listed on shareware/freeware disk compendiums a couple years later (which was cool for a 10 year old...)

They're unplayable now -- ignoring the CGA graphics, it was one of those old games that didn't properly handle increased clock rates. Run it on a 386 and you lost the ball instantly because it was running too fast.

There's a modern version available now... Visual Pinball, which seems pretty good. Much more complicated, of course, but we're comparing CGA and 4.77 MHz to SVGA and 400 MHz.

Visual Pinball

pinmame (if you want to see emulated electronics in your sims)

I think the "Construction Set" aspect still exists in many games, but it's taken new form. With the rise of First Person shooters and RTS as the more popular forms of entertainment, I think that sort of thing has moved into customizing the game. It takes quite a bit of talent to build really good levels, or brand new campaigns, and also quite a bit of devotion.

I see your problem though. Those sorts of activities are very much confined to the geek. Level design and game mods take quite a bit of computer expertise, and I get the feeling you were thinking along different lines. Games like The Incredible Machine come to mind. I'd be hard pressed to give you references, but one "Construction Set" games comes to mind. If you're interested in the game of pinball, I recommend Visual Pinball. It's a complete pinball game construction program, and it works beautifully. Much to the dismay of most of the Slashdot crowd, though, it's main drive is VBScript. Very fun and easy to use, however. The programming is basic enough that I think a beginner could learn to use it very easily.

Other than that, there's lots of software out there for music creation and whatnot. It may not be presented in game form, but if you have an itch to do it, I'm sure those would serve just as well!

There was a pinball construction set, IIRC, for the C-64, maybe someone's done like for the PC? With the speed of processors this should be a piece of cake, these days.

Hehe - there is. It's called Visual Pinball, located at http://www.randydavis.com/vp/.

It's a pinball construction set like has never been done before. It uses VBScript (yes, I know) to do logic and other such, and can do just about anything a real pinball table can do. And if you want proof that's the case, they've got a version of PinMAME designed especially to link up with Visual Pinball (VPinMAME), and there are dozens of real tables that you can download, pick up the ROMs, and play on Visual Pinball. Not only old classics like Defender, Gorgar, Space Invaders, and Mr. and Mrs. Pac-Man pinball games, but newer ones, including the best two of all time, The Addams Family and Twilight Zone. Both nearly as good as playing the real machine.

perhaps complete this with the addition of

[Visual Pinball Homepage]

and

[IR-pinball]

for a variety of tables, and I *think* rom images (for PinMAME, otherwise the manufacturers usually put them out on their sites for those blessed with an actual machine) Sad part (for me at least) is that there isn't a similar (or port for that matter) project under Linux. Any pinball-addicted developers up for the challenge?

There has been awesome work done--the tables and electronics are emulated to the point that they all work together and are as close to the real thing as you can get without stepping into the arcade.

The downside is that this stuff is very much Windows-centric. So that means I have to reboot to get my fix of Circus Voltaire.

Au contraire! I just had a class on UML last semester, and was surprised how useful UML could be. Simple diagrams can be used to show management where you're headed with your ideas. Some of the more complicated diagrams can lay everything out for your code-jockey to do the work. Proper modelling will usually save time and energy on all but the smallest of projects.

An analogy may be drawn from construction. A simple construction project like a shelf may require no modelling. Even I can eyeball a piece of wood and probably craft a pretty decent shelf. (Can you tell I practically failed wood-shop?) However, more complicated projects like a cabinet would require me to write down how I would construct the thing. How complex does a project have to be before one would want to risk NOT modelling?

I've actually used UML since I took the class. I've been playing around with making pinball machines in Visual Pinball lately, and found that UML State Charts are perfect for modelling the states of a pinball table. Not exactly a practical application, but still... ;-)

UML can be a very complicated system, but not all of it is necessary all at once. Probably the 20/80 rule applies to it. Learning 20% of UML, will yield about 80% functionality. A little bit of UML can go a long way. Now that I've taken the class, I can't imagine doing OO design without it.

UML is worthy to explore, but I'll agree with the poster on one point: I don't think I trust getting info about it in a "Teach Yourself in 24 Hours" book.
--

If you love Pinball machines - you have to check out pinmame & Visual Pinball.

These allow you to emulate Pinball machines with REAL physics and gameplay - they even use the Pinball machine ROMs.

Here's the stuff:
Visual Pinball
Pinball Tables and other useful stuff)