How to: Play Classic Pinball Machines for Free with Visual Pinball

Posted 12/06/2009 at 3:00pm | by Alex Castle

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Downloading Tables

Although downloading pinball tables is subject to some of the same legal sketchiness as arcade machine ROMs, it’s generally not as much of an issue, since most of the companies involved have been defunct for a long time, or have given their explicit or implicit approval to the Visual Pinball community. As such, table recreations and ROMs are freely available for download at VPforums.org or at the sites of individual tablemakers, such as JPSalas.

You need two things to play most tables: a table (.vpt) file, and a ROM. Generally, both can be downloaded from the same site. For instance, to find a table on VPforums.org, just open the 4:3 Table Downloads menu, then click VPM Recreations under Visual Pinball 9. Then, to find its accompanying ROM, just click ROMs in the same menu, also under Visual Pinball 9.

Both files come zipped, but (and this is IMPORTANT) you need to unzip the table file, and ONLY the table file. Drop the UNZIPPED table file in the tables folder in your Visual Pinball directory, and the ZIPPED ROM in the roms folder in your pinMAME directory (itself a subfolder of the Visual Pinball directory).

Playing a Table

Once you’ve got everything in its right place, it’s time to launch Visual Pinball. When you run the executable, an empty editor window opens up. Choose File > Open and select one of the tables that you downloaded. Then, either click on Table > Play or click on the Play button in the editor toolset.

Once the game launches, the default controls are as follows:

5 – Insert Coin
1 – Start
Enter – Pull back plunger
Left or right shift – Left or right flipper
Z or / - Left or right nudge