Are people familiar with MAME? It a emulator for almost every existing type of arcade hardware out there, and I heartily recommend you check it out if you have any interest in arcade games.

Well, MAME is all well and good, but over the weekend, I discovered something new and exciting. It turns out that a fork of MAME has been created to emulate the computing hardware of pinball machines. It's called PinMAME. So basically, what this gives you is the ability to emulate the dot-matrix displays that you see on modern pinball machines. This isn't too exciting in and of itself, but some enterprising soul has combined PinMAME with a piece of software called Visual Pinball, and the results are compelling, to say the least.

Visual Pinball is a pinball construction set. It allows you to build a virtual pinball tables to your specifications, adding bumpers, kickers, orbits, additional playfields, whatever. The cool part is that it then allows you to play those tables using a pretty decent pinball game engine. The catch here, of course, is that Visual Pinball itself doesn't support any kind of advanced features, beyond the kind of stuff you'd find in your typical late 70's table. However, there are plenty of those tables out there, and the large Internet pinball community has done an amazing job of recreating actual pinball tables in Visual Pinball, which means that you can play a ton of classic pinball tables, emulated through VP.

The magic doesn't stop there though. VP also allows PinMAME to be plugged into it, so that VP handles the table emulation, and PinMAME handles the computer-y bits. Do you see where this is going?

( Visual PinMAME allows for the emulation of new, complicated tables. )

The emulation experience isn't the same as playing the actual table, but the physics are pretty decent, and it's fun to play. And for me at least, it can help learn the tables. So far, I've got LOTRO up and running on it, as well as a couple of older tables and No-Good Gofers. Medieval Madness (my favorite table) seems to have a ROM issue so I'm still trying to get it to work, but there's plenty of other tables available at Pinball Nirvana, which also incidentally has an all-in-one installer for VP and PinMAME. Of course, I didn't find that until well after I had been through manually configuring them. =P

I know only a couple of people reading will be interested in this, but I thought it was *damn* cool.

In the mail today:

Greetings,

You’ve been invited to participate in Richard Garriott’s Tabula Rasa™ beta testing!. In order to create your account on the beta server, you are being provided the following serial code.

Is it open beta or something? I never get these.