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Do you like the real Twilight Zone (TZ) pinball table, then read on! If you haven't played TZ, then read on! Really, just read on! :)

There has come out a couple of really cool pinball simulation applications over the last year, of which pretty much all are needed in order to experience what this article is all about, namely: "a TZ simulation/emulation with the sound and dmd animations from the real TZ pinball!!" Let me try to quickly introduce the different applications needed to get things running (see the related links section below for links to separate articles for some of the programs).

The Programs

Randy Davis Visual Pinball: Do I need to write anything here? This is simply the best pinball simulation editor that has been made to todays date. It allows you to by use of an editor visually add objects to a table blueprint, when the table is loaded it will be rendered in 3d (in a front perspective of your choice). Everything that happens on the table is controlled through a script which you write (in vb). Currently tables made with VP (sometimes refered to as VPT, Visual Pinball Tables) requires the enduser to have a copy of VP as the table is loaded through the editor.

PinMAME32: A cool "little" program that allows you to look inside the ROM files for real pinballs (well, it goes a bit deeper than that with emulating a system that the ROM can be loaded into, I think). The ROM files are where most of the table information (instructions on what happens when a thing on the table is hit by the ball), dmd animations and sound for a real pinball is stored. Using PinMAME32 you can watch the dmd animations for a real pinball and if possible listen to the sound in the pinball. You can not play a simulation of a real pinball simply by creating a system onto which the pinballs ROM can be loaded, I mean, a pinball consists of a lot of mechanical parts and things, the ROM file has no idea what these things look like and no possibility to recreate them. That is though where the previous and next program comes into the picture.

Visual PinMAME: This neat program allows dmd animations/sound from pinball ROM's to be used/integrated into a Visual Pinball table! I believe this program requires PinMAME32 in order to fully work (at least I found it much easier to first download PinMAME32 and install it, and then download VPinMAME and unzip it into the PinMAME32 directory, possibly overwriting some files in the PinMAME32 directory when doing so, this way I had all neccessary subdirectories created for me).

Testing TZ - a Diary

After having received an email telling me it was possible to run TZ with the dmd/sound from the real TZ pinball ROM files (thx Alex!) I immediately the day after the next started to try to download the programs needed in order to get things running. I first tried to visit welcome.to/vpinball as I was told there would be instructions on how to set things up there, unfortunately that server was down. But how hard can it be to set this up without instructions I thought (a bit hastily as it turned out)?

I already had Visual Pinball installed, but it wasn't the latest version, so I downloaded the latest version from http://www.randydavis.com/vp (which at the time was Tech Beta 3, the big download, not just the executable, not sure if that was necessary).

Next I realized I probably needed the VP TZ table, ok, where do I get that? And the TZ ROM files? And where do I get PinMAME32/Visual PinMAME? It was easy enough to find out about PinMAME's homepage at pinmame.emuviews.com, though there was a couple to many downloads there. Instead I surfed (where does that term come from) on into the PinMAME32 discussion board where I found a handy instruction text on what to download.

Basically this is what I needed to download in order to get TZ running (I found the below download instructions posted to the PinMAME32 discussion board by Dorsola, I edited some downloads so it would hopefully be up to date for the moment here):

Step 6: Download the Twilight Zone ROM (tz_94h)
- http://www.hippie.net/shivasite/roms/WPCmame/tz_94h.zip
* Move the tz_94h.zip file to the pinmame\roms folder

If some links don't work, check the "Related Links" section below for other pages that might contina some more up to date links.

The above instructions contain direct links to all things needed except Visual Pinball (instead select a download of your liking from the download page that is linked). Unfortunately (for me) I ran into troubles with registering the vpinmame.dll included with Visual PinMAME, luckily I could without problems register the dll on my other computer.

But... due to some swapping of harddrives between my two computers windows wasn't working all to well, I kept getting DirectX error msgs even though I had DirectX installed. No bother I thought, I'll just reinstall DirectX (this is windows, commonly you reinstall things to solve problems), but unfortunately the install program kept crashing due to bad existing installation of DirectX or something, I don't know. Not feeling up to reinstalling windows to solve the reminding problems (which is always the final approach to solve something unsolveable), I returned to my other computer.

Reading the PinMAME discussion board I noticed I wasn't alone with this problem, unfortunately no solution had yet been found so I spend some hours toying with updating dll's and similar to no avail. Some days later I saw on the msgboard that the solution to all of this was ofcourse to update Interent Explorer (one always does that when one has troubles with pinball games, *duh*). Anyways, suddenly everything worked!!!

The VP TZ sim is fantastic with the sounds and dmd animations from the real TZ pinball. The VP TZ table itself is in my opinion a fantastic replica of the real table, great work! Ofcourse, it is not what one would get if the Cunning ppl were to sit down to create an emulation of the TZ table, but is still a lot of fun to play. You need a rather speedy computer to play with sounds on though (somewhere in the whereabouts of a piii-400> I think I read). It is possible though to turn off sound which will make playing smoother, though this lowers the gameplay a lot and is not recommended.

After reading some more on the PinMAME discussion forum I notice that there, besides the person who originally sat down and scripted/wrote the VPT TZ v1.0, has (is) really been a lot of work by other people (readers of the forum etc.) on the VP TZ table. It is thanks to this work by willing and cunning people that the version 1.82 now exists. Cool! The version history text included with the VP TZ table download indicates that a lot of people have been involved. I'm not sure who made the first version of the VP TZ table, does anyone know? The version history text file says "1.0 (Anonymous Author)". The fact the source script for the VP tables is available for anyone who downloads the table in question seems to really be a great thing when it comes to perfection and fast updates of the table (over the course of the last month it seems that at least 5-6 versions of the TZ table has come out with 1.82 hopefully being the latest as it is the one linked above).

Perhaps there's some factual errors in this article concerning what programs is really needed etc., but the above is a summary of how I got it to work at least... Anyway, good luck getting things up and running, if you run into problems, visit the PinMAME32 discussion board where there's lots of dedicated people willing to help.

see you in...

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