Eons ago I programmed on Win98SE 2 very sophisticated Visual Pinball tables with true EM emulation (i.e. authentic timing and you can hear each relay!).
http://weltenschule.de/pinball.html
Unfortunately VP6 from 2002 contains a shareware timer that has expired, and even the proclaimed fixed exe from 2004 (vpinballexetb61.zip) apparently expired too. I fortunately found out that the editor mode can still load and run games by pressing F5, but clicking on a vpt file only shows the expiration error. 
- Can VP6 tables run properly on newer Visual Pinball versions?
My PC is a Highscreen Colani bigtower (AMD K6-3@550MHz, 768MB RAM, GeForce 3 TI 200 graphics, 2 genuine ISA soundcards, DFI K6 BV3+ mainboard, Win98SE/KernelEx and old Linux on 160GB HDD) that I finally modded into a dual-PC case with additional modern hardware (Ryzen 2400G, 16MB RAM, AsRock B450 ITX mainboard, 8TB HDD) running Linux Mint and Win10 on a 22'' 4:3 Trinitron CRT monitor.
As a collector of vintage electronics I heavily misused the old system for storing huge quantities of downloaded HTML pages (schematics of music keyboard hardware etc., some 10000 old eBay pages etc.) until FAT32 became too clogged for gaming. (In 2008 I had lost most of the game and emulator installation in a harddisk crash by too old drivers anyway.)
Finally in 2018 I dismantled and heavily modified the Colani bigtower case (took me a year, also for adding TEMPEST-style RF shielding) to install an additional modern PC mainboard - not least because Win98SE could not run modern webbrowsers. Now I am reinstalling many of the old original games and emulators.
I still have >440 downloaded VP6 pinball games and want to make them playable again. On the old 550MHz CPU some PinMAME stuff ran slow; and I also circumvented a multiball slowdown bug by making a patch rattling those tables to keep balls moving. So it would be best to install them now on the modern mainboard if this is possible. But already on Win98SE the background text positions of my games shift when played at 1280*1024 instead of the original 1024*768, so I worry it will mess up.
- Is VP8 fully compatible with VP6, or will I need tricks to run VP6 on new hardware?
- Is there a VP6 patch against the expiration timer?
- Does VP6 or VP8 install properly on Linux? (with WINE/PlayOnLinux)
Top
Contributor
are all trademarks of VPFORUMS.