Hi there. I have a specific question that may be a pipe dream, but I wanted to ask it anyway. Are any developers here able to confirm whether Visual Pinball could potentially support achievements in the future? I'm a developer at retroachievements.org, and I just released a set for Sonic Pinball Party on Gameboy Advance. It was a very satisfying thing to develop, and many people are having a fun time playing it and earning achievements via the RetroAchievements framework that works in the background of RetroArch as well as other supported emulators and frontends. For anyone unfamiliar, since I don't expect everyone in the hardcore pinball crowd to necessarily know about this concept, but achievements are basically a social integration system in "modern" game systems, allowing anyone with a free account to basically receive a little digital badge/sticker for completing specific tasks in a game (like beating a level without dying, finding an easter egg, getting a certain score, etc.). This concept started with the Xbox 360 nearly 20 years ago, but persists to this day on the current Xbox Series of consoles, and was so influential that Sony integrated a very similar Trophy system, and Steam, Epic, and many other PC frontends have their own version of achievements too. Nintendo is really the only major brand that has refused to add a similar system, but that's neither here nor there.
RetroAchievements utilizes tools that expose games' running memory to people like me interested in developing achievement "sets" for other users to play and earn. We use the tools available to parse the memory, narrowing down in-game points of interest like points, levels, player health, among many other things relevant to build a set. Many retro systems are supported, from Atari 2600 to the Playstation 2, from Gameboy to PSP, even many obscure consoles like 3DO and Atari Jaguar are supported, as well as many Japanese-centric systems.
I'm a huge pinball fan. I am currently running PinballY as a frontend for ease of use, but more and more I see other very nice frontends popping up. As the hobby expands, I was curious if achievement integration could be part of that expansion. I know I would be personally interested both as a developer and as a player to earn achievements in Visual Pinball; it's such a solid engine, and with its PinMAME integration it really sets itself apart. Ironically, MAME is not yet a supported platform on RetroAchievements (though FinalBurn Neo is), so it may be a while before Visual Pinball can even be considered as a new integration, but depending on how Visual Pinball does or doesn't expose memory, it may be unneeded. Unfortunately, I'm not a programmer; I just know a decent amount of the terminology and have learned these specific tools. I have no idea how easy, hard, or in-between it would be to incorporate a system like this into Visual Pinball's framework. Heck, I don't even know if there would be that much demand from players to do so. But speaking as a fan myself, I know I'd have a lot of fun playing my favorite pinball games and trying to earn achievements by completing specific goals and table events. RetroAchievements also supports leaderboards, so competing against your friends/the world could be very fun for people too, even if achievements didn't tickle their fancy.
Also please note I'm not sending this message on behalf of anyone at RetroAchievements; I'm just sending it out of pure curiosity. I'm in no way trying to say or imply this should be a priority for Visual Pinball. In fact, as far as I'm concerned it should be towards the bottom of any hypothetical priority list. But not knowing the details, I figured it wouldn't hurt to ask. If it turned out it was a relatively simple matter, then I'd hate myself for not asking, you know? Thanks for your time 
Side note: for any emulation fans that like video pinball and are curious, here's the hub on RetroAchievements showing all the supported pinball games: https://retroachieve....org/game/13449 (games with numbers by them have sets, ones that are worth 0 points are simply recognized by the site, but are open for developers to make sets/leaderboards for).
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