Hacker News Reader

Comment by freeqaz | Hacker News Reader

I have struggled to get this project working on non-Windows. It just hangs and crashes no matter what I do or try on Linux/Mac. It's a very Windows-oriented project that's slowly losing the shackles right now.

View on HN

Not gonna lie, some tables require way too much work, every software today wants you to be an engineer with 20+ years of some specific experience, what about just double click and let me play the damn game?

Yeah, I hear you but as I mentioned in my reply to your other post there is a long-term silver-lining to having a bit of onboarding complexity. I think it's a big reason the VPin community is well into its second decade and still full of passionately committed contributors freely sharing awesome stuff. If you want drive-by casual pinball there are reasonably-priced pinball systems on PS5/XBox/Switch and Steam that are quite good. While VPin has gotten much easier in recent years, it's still a hobby that requires active engagement. VPin rewards that effort by enabling unbelievably high-quality, flexibility, customization, community enhancements and an ever-growing library of amazing content that'll take years to explore.

I think the mismatch is when people see all these awesome pinball games "Fer Free!" and assume they're going to click Install and be playing in a couple minutes. I tell my friends to expect at least a half-hour before first play - and that they'll have to read and follow a couple pages of good (but not perfect) instructions to understand and configure a few different tools. If you want things to work reliably:

* Stick to only Visual Pinball (not older emulators like Future Pinball).

* Install it with Pinup Popper and set up your screen mapping and controls based on one of the standard default configs.

* Run tables released or updated relatively recently (3 yrs or so).

* Run tables from well-known release groups and authors (like Visual Pinball Workshop).

* Wait to run newly released tables until they've been out a month, have >200 of downloads and >20 positive reviews.

* Don't run add-ons which mod tables until you're experienced.

And once you're past the install phase and have a bunch of tables fully working with all the bells and whistles you want, there's a new tool called VPin Studio that's great for maintaining your VPin system https://github.com/syd711/vpin-studio.

Re Linux: I've only ever run VPin on Windows. I've seen posts from happy people who run it on Linux so apparently it can work very well but cross-platform is newer so there's less info on it. On Windows getting a full VPin install working is just a little cantankerous but no worse than you'd expect when you realize it's several open source hobby projects which pass data in various ways and aren't usually directly tested together.

Nice thanks, I might check all this again later.

It works fairly well for me in Linux on WINE, even with Visual PinMAME. I believe I used the all-in-one installer (vpx7setup.exe, although there's a later version now).

My GPU is an AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT, if that makes a difference.

have you followed their build instructions? https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball/blob/standalone/standal...

last time i tried on Debian it just worked... their developer testing app also works flawlessly on Android. Arch Linux has an AUR package with the last git and i updated it yesterday and played a bit before bed

I'd be curious to play a VR table, but the amount of tinkering required exceeds my curiosity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com