I have struggled to get this project working on non-Windows. It just hangs and crashes no matter what I do or try on Linux/Mac. It's a very Windows-oriented project that's slowly losing the shackles right now.
Not gonna lie, some tables require way too much work, every software today wants you to be an engineer with 20+ years of some specific experience, what about just double click and let me play the damn game?
Yeah, I hear you but as I mentioned in my reply to your other post there is a long-term silver-lining to having a bit of onboarding complexity. I think it's a big reason the VPin community is well into its second decade and still full of passionately committed contributors freely sharing awesome stuff. If you want drive-by casual pinball there are reasonably-priced pinball systems on PS5/XBox/Switch and Steam that are quite good. While VPin has gotten much easier in recent years, it's still a hobby that requires active engagement. VPin rewards that effort by enabling unbelievably high-quality, flexibility, customization, community enhancements and an ever-growing library of amazing content that'll take years to explore.
I think the mismatch is when people see all these awesome pinball games "Fer Free!" and assume they're going to click Install and be playing in a couple minutes. I tell my friends to expect at least a half-hour before first play - and that they'll have to read and follow a couple pages of good (but not perfect) instructions to understand and configure a few different tools. If you want things to work reliably:
* Stick to only Visual Pinball (not older emulators like Future Pinball).
* Install it with Pinup Popper and set up your screen mapping and controls based on one of the standard default configs.
* Run tables released or updated relatively recently (3 yrs or so).
* Run tables from well-known release groups and authors (like Visual Pinball Workshop).
* Wait to run newly released tables until they've been out a month, have >200 of downloads and >20 positive reviews.
* Don't run add-ons which mod tables until you're experienced.
And once you're past the install phase and have a bunch of tables fully working with all the bells and whistles you want, there's a new tool called VPin Studio that's great for maintaining your VPin system https://github.com/syd711/vpin-studio.
Re Linux: I've only ever run VPin on Windows. I've seen posts from happy people who run it on Linux so apparently it can work very well but cross-platform is newer so there's less info on it. On Windows getting a full VPin install working is just a little cantankerous but no worse than you'd expect when you realize it's several open source hobby projects which pass data in various ways and aren't usually directly tested together.
It works fairly well for me in Linux on WINE, even with Visual PinMAME. I believe I used the all-in-one installer (vpx7setup.exe, although there's a later version now).
My GPU is an AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT, if that makes a difference.
last time i tried on Debian it just worked... their developer testing app also works flawlessly on Android. Arch Linux has an AUR package with the last git and i updated it yesterday and played a bit before bed
+1 on Visual Pinball, it's really mind-blowingly great and supported by a huge, very active community of artists and table developers. For anyone who doesn't yet know, there are hundreds of high-quality tables with a dozen or more new releases every week. While there are new, original tables which do things no physical pinball table can, many are lovingly hand-crafted recreations of commercial pinball machines including all the legendary classics from the 1950s to the 2000s. Any table you remember from your teen years is very probably already emulated.
Much like the MAME project is preserving arcade games before they are lost, the VPin community is doing historical preservation so future generations can enjoy these electro-mechanical machines. Under the hood in Visual Pinball the pinball machine ROMs are emulated by a special version of MAME called PinMAME, while Visual Pinball does the 3D rendering and physics simulation.
The majority of users play VPin on desktop with a keyboard but in the same way some MAME players add dedicated arcade buttons and joysticks or even a dedicated arcade cabinet, VPin supports running in a cabinet which looks like a pinball machine but has a flat-screen where the playfield would be as well as flipper buttons and a real plunger to launch the virtual ball.
VPin supports stereo sound but can also use the extra channels from a standard PC sound card's 7.1 output to drive effects like a subwoofer, bass shaker and up to four channels of positional haptic feedback for realism you don't just hear but feel. I was shocked at how accurately the transducers recreate the feel of real pinball bumpers and slingshots firing inside the cabinet down to the subtle vibration of a metal ball rolling across a wood playfield. In my cabinet I even added flipper solenoids from a pinball machine under the screen where the flippers are rendered. I can vouch for the net effect feeling authentic since my VPin cab sits in our game room next to 8 real pinball machines and a custom MAME arcade cab.
If you're interested in trying out Visual Pinball I strongly recommend starting with the Pinup Popper auto-installer that @eahm linked above (https://nailbuster.com/wikipinup/doku.php). All of this amazing goodness is the result of several different projects which work seamlessly together but installing it all in the right order and places can be confusing the first-time. Having to actually RTFM a bit to do my first install was slightly annoying but I now realize not being one-click user friendly is an upside. It keeps the VPin hobby in that ideal zone where it's just complex enough to limit drive-by casuals from mob spamming an otherwise super-fun, completely free, retro-adjacent hobby and that's why there's still a highly-engaged, knowledgeable community.
Debian is probably the best of all the Linuxes, but still suffers from split-brain: If patches are sent upstream first, Debian can't start digesting them until they're already public.
With FreeBSD there's never any question of "who should this get reported to".
> Debian can't start digesting them until they're already public
Not sure what you mean by this. Debian is able to handle coordinated disclosures (when they're actually coordinated), and get embargoed security updates out rapidly without breaking the embargo.
Is there some other aspect of this that you're referencing?
The key words there are "when they're actually coordinated". Debian doesn't own the Linux kernel, and the kernel developers don't bother with coordinated disclosure, so the happy path of coordinated disclosure only happens when reporters make the non-obvious choice of reporting vulnerabilities to people other than the maintainers.
First thing is it was released much after BreezePDF was.
You could make the same argument with Adobe or any other PDF software. Why doesn't everyone use all use BentoPDF? Things like brand, and simply what shows up when they search on Google are factors.
Also, Bento doesn't have a desktop app a regular person can download. You have to download the GitHub. Non-developers won't do that.
Additionally, each tool is separate. It's not all in one editor. That's a UX consideration. BreezePDF, everything is in one editor interface. It added a lot of development complexity but makes the UX better in my opinion.
I tried Bento and some of their tools are very slow, cause of large downloads to the client. BreezePDF is much faster.
Good for them making an open source tool though. Lots of options out there and everyone can choose for themselves.
> Lots of options out there and everyone can choose for themselves.
You are shilling your stuff at a wrong place, I think. Better apply to YC or, I dunno, go public. Also add some nice catch phrases (e.g. "Blazing Fast", "Production Ready") and emojis here and there.
Show HN is show your product. That's what I'm doing. It's not an open source forum. The only shilling is mentioning other products on someone else's post...
IMO Ubuntu Mono and Ubuntu Sans Mono are two of the best fonts ever made, comparable to Consolas, which I think it's still the best monospace font... talking about monospace fonts.
John Carmack is not exactly known for being a lazy slacker. In fact, in the past few years he expressed his opinion that people should work longer hours if they're being serious about their work, and has gotten a bunch of push back for it.
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