MAMEWorld Forums - News - Re: Visual Pinmame 2.4 released.

> Regarding the Visual Pinball part, ugh, and considering that once you remove all of
> the graphics and gameplay from a pinball game you get a score/bonus display and some
> sounds you can trigger at best, it definitely wouldn't especially stoke anyone's
> fires except crazed pokérom'rs and people who found it a technical achievement,...and
> building something to replace it from scratch for MAME just to support them would be
> formidable. I had hoped maybe there was some way that MAME could interface with VP
> using it's all-purpose i/o system.

I'm inclined to disagree with this.

The score/bonus display you are referring to is known as DMD (Dot Matrix Display). Different Pinball games depending on what company created/released it have different looks to them, and probably different CPUs/hardware which makes these displays possible.

Compare Elvira and the Party Monsters (Bally) (1989) & Rollergames (Williams) (1990) To Star Trek The Next Generation (Williams) (1993) & Demolition Man (Williams) (1994) Which most likely have different CPUs & hardware.

I don't care about MAMEs ability to play Visual table recreations from Authors that created them in a VP enviroment, but I do care about documentation of the hardware and low level emulation of the individual components/instructions if possible.

As a long time Pinball fan that has played more than 50 real tables when they were popular in Arcades, it's amazing that some table author that has never played the real table can make a recreation so close to the real thing.

I greatly appreciate what PinMAME and VP accomplishes and sure there is always room for improvement, so if the ROMs being added to MAME sparks someone's interest to make simulation/emulation of the DMDs more accurate, and accomplishes MAME's Philosophy and accuracy, than that's wonderful.

Since this hardware was present in Arcades it should be preserved. However, since there is no way to dump a pinball tables flipper/bumper etc. I don't necessarily ever expect to run that part in MAME. Of course anything is indeed possible