A bit further down the virtual pinball rabbit hole today. This is fascinating.

So Visual Pinball X is the jankiest thing, and yet elegant in a way. It's built on MAME, but MAME only emulates the simplistic ROMs that handle game state in the tables. Score the the DMD and stuff.

For actual rendering of the table, physics, and controls you have a separate program. This program just renders the table, simulates collision zones, and applies physics to the ball.

VPX then sends "X objective got hit" to MAME, which uses that info to simulate game state in the CPU, then send back instructions for the DMD, which VPX renders.
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@trysdyn That is the hackiest hack and I love it.
-F

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