That Deaf, Dumb and Blind Kid Sure Plays a Mean Pinball

A recent oldie victory prompted me to go totally pinball-mad. I'll explain.

Pinball Dreams for the Amiga is among my favorite pinball (and Amiga) games of all time. The ball physics are realistic, there don't seem to be any glitches, and each table is lovingly constructed and full of musical cues without much blank, empty, uninteresting space. Ignition and Nightmare are my favorites from it.

But upon trying to run WinUAE on my new laptop (which I still haven't named), I found it to be...less than satisfactory. Tweaking eventually got the emulator to run full speed, but in a window the size of a postage stamp (fullscreen was horrible due to lack of hardware acceleration and my laptop's built-in upscaler not filtering at all), with sound so low-frequency that it sounded like static half the time, and could not have anything running in the background.

So I scratched that idea. It wasn't worth it.

But I wasn't finished yet. I recalled there being a PC version that worked pretty well. But as PC games were at the time, it ran in DOS. The laptop isn't quite powerful enough to handle DOSBox, so I opted to try VDMSound instead, which while old, is still very reliable when you figure out the nuances to getting it to work. One small tweak to the configuration, and I had Pinball Dreams running at full speed, with Sound Blaster Pro sound emulated (albeit scratchily). I was satisfied...almost.

Getting Pinball Dreams working again just launched me into pinball frenzy, the likes of which I haven't felt since I found a unique Arkanoid table for Visual Pinball (by the way, that won't work on the laptop either - no hardware support means I might as well be playing Sisyphus Pinball). I've found more than enough that works, though: the rest of 21st Century's pinball games (Fantasies, Illusions, Dreams 2, Absolute, Slam Tilt, and World) and Empire Interactive's Pro Pinball series all work extremely well. Pro Pinball: The Web looks and runs beautifully at 1024x768 in 16-bit color. 3D Ultra Pinball, while it runs, strikes me as a rather...not good pinball game in retrospect, mainly with its floaty ball physics.

More is on the way, of course. I actually shelled out cash to buy a retail box of all four Pro Pinball games (everything from The Web to Fantastic Journey) and I hope to receive it sometime this week.

Then if I happen to have the urge to play a real pinball machine, there's one in the Rice Box on 10th Avenue that's good fun. Of course: I move into a neighborhood, and the first thing I learn is the locations of all the games!