I wanted to write a straightforward guide to installing Visual Pinball X, the most versatile pinball emulator. There's a lot of conflicting information out there about the best way to install it, and welp I guess I'll add to that!
These instructions are for installing VPX on a Windows desktop computer. I do not, at any point, assume that you have or aspire to have a pinball cabinet, which most of the directions out there do. For the basic instructions, I even suppose that you have just one monitor.
(My ideal monitor setup is two monitors, a portrait one on the left for the table surface, and a landscape one on the right for everything else. I'll describe how to make VPX cooperate with this in a later part.)
These instructions do not install "PinUP Popper". PinUP Popper is a launcher, like Steam's "Big Picture Mode", with an installer that sets up a bunch of these other components for you but doesn't tell you how it did it. I don't like it, and in my experience, if you go the PinUP Popper route, you'll still have to configure things but you won't even necessarily know where to find the things you're configuring.
I tested these instructions on a computer that never had VPX on it before, and got to the state you can see in the screenshots above.
Basic setup
Download the latest stable Visual Pinball from GitHub. That is, find the latest version that isn't beta, which is 10.7.4 as I write this, click on "Assets", and choose the version that says "Release" and "x64".
When I first wrote these directions, the x64 version didn't exist. Only the 32-bit ("x86") version existed. There are now tables that run out of memory on the 32-bit version, so you'll want the 64-bit version, but I guess I can't promise that I've tested these directions from start to finish on it.
Run the installer. On the "Choose Components" screen, you can leave the defaults as is. We're going to be installing B2S, but the one that comes with this installer isn't the right version.
Installing in the default location, C:\Visual Pinball, is fine. Pin or shortcut this folder somewhere, you'll be using it a lot.
(You might see other instructions recommending C:\VPinball\Visual Pinball. That's fine too.)
Now you can download and run .vpx tables! Here's a straightforward one to start with: Hang Glider, 1976, recreated by VPin Workshop.
This is an EM (electro-mechanical) table, so there is no ROM for it; it should just work. It's got a nice feature in desktop mode, where it'll show the table backglass (including the score) in the top right of the background.
Some tables have this, some don't and you'll need to set up additional outputs. That'll happen later in the instructions.
Hey at this point you might want to know some keyboard controls:
- 5 = insert coin
- 1 = start game
- enter = pull plunger
- left shift = left flipper, right shift = right flipper
- left ctrl = left magna save, right ctrl = right magna save
- "Right magna save" (right ctrl) is also used as an extra button for other purposes -- if you're into old pinball like I am, you'll need to know it's the button to load a ball into the manual ball loader, on 1930s-1960s machines. It's also the alligator on Nip-It.
- Z = nudge left side, / = nudge right side, space = nudge front
- F3 = reboot the table
- Esc = menu / quit
Xbox controller controls
- That button with two rectangles in it that I want to call "select" = insert coin
- Start = start game
- A or right joystick = pull plunger
- left bumper = left flipper, right bumper = right flipper
- X = left magna save, B = right magna save or load a ball
- You probably want to be able to use the D-pad to nudge, and this doesn't quite work with built-in VPX features, so I use joy2key to map D-pad directions to the nudge keys (Z, /, and space).
Get some tables and ROMs
Virtual Pinball Spreadsheet will be an invaluable resource for finding tables to play. You can search for tables by name, filter them by year or manufacturer, and look for tables by good VPX creators. (Some creators I recommend looking for: Bord, BorgDog, JPSalas, and Goldchicco.)
This "spreadsheet" (it's not really a spreadsheet, it's a whole web app) will give you links to VPForums.org and VPUniverse.com. You need to register accounts on those forums. I know you don't want to. I didn't want to either. You still have to, or else you're not getting many pinball tables.
Let's walk through an example that should work at this point.
- Go to Virtual Pinball Spreadsheet.
- Search for "Frankenstein". You're looking for Sega's "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein", from 1995.
- Click the link to the table by Schlabber34 et al. This opens a link to VPUniverse, with a green download button as long as you're logged in.
- Click the download button. Wait 45 seconds (I know this sucks). Get your file and extract it into
C:\Visual Pinball\Tables. - Back on the "Spreadsheet": scroll down below the tables and the backglasses, to the less conspicuous "ROMs" section.
- Click the link to VPForums to get
frankst.zip. Save that inC:\Visual Pinball\VPinMAME\roms. Don't unzip it, and don't put it in Tables.
Now double-click on the "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1995).vpx" that you extracted into Tables. VPX should start up Frankenstein. There will be a dot matrix display somewhere on the screen, and you can drag it around if it's in the wrong place.
(If you've been unlucky with your setup, it may be behind the pinball table window and you may have to use your taskbar to find it. I think I've avoided guiding you into that situation with these steps.)
Insert two quarters (press 5 twice), start the game (press 1), and have a dramatic pinball experience.
In this single-display desktop setup, you will note that they drew a nice frame for the DMD to go in, and the DMD misses the frame. Nothing's perfect.
Where you are now
You can now find and play a bunch of VPX tables, as long as they were considerately designed for desktop mode!
In later parts I want to cover:
- Setting up "DirectB2S", the external backglass display, which shows the backglass in another window. Some tables require this to see your score.
- Getting an authentic-looking alphanumeric display, for tables released from 1977 to 1990.
- Using a portrait-mode monitor to show a top-down view of the table.
