You got British Geek in my Pinball No You got Pinball in My British Geek!

November 21, 2006 9:36 PM

Pinball filter!

A ways back, like five years. I remember finding and downing and finding a a way to play Doctor Who pinball on a pc. Via an emulator.

Years later I am on a Mac and it looks like the sites I went to are either long gone or not updated.

Anyone have a good primer on where to start and where to go to find some pinball goodness.

I am having a harder and harder time finding machines in the wild.

posted by jeribus to technology (6 comments total)

Tangetially related, and quite interesting looking: Mac Pinball History, from Pinball Construction Set in 1985 to the 2005 (2006?) release of Littlewing's Carbonized Monster Fair for OS X.
posted by xiojason at 10:02 PM on November 21, 2006

I always start with Zophar's Domain if I have any emulation needs. Its "other emulation" links page has a link to The Player's Portal, but that seems to be the only immediate Pinball link I can find, you might find something more if you rummage through the links yourself.
posted by krisjohn at 11:39 PM on November 21, 2006

The current state of pinball emulation seems to provide less than satisfactory results, but that's just my opinion after spending over half an hour getting Doctor Who mostly running. It doesn't looks like there's a working Mac equivalent out there, as Visual Pinball is based off Visual Basic and PinMAME for Mac is not yet available. If Parallels or Boot Camp are viable options on your Mac though, there's an overall guide for PC here:

Arcade@Home 's Pinball section offers a user-created pintable for 1992's Doctor Who (Bally/Midway). You'll need Visual Pinball and PinMAME/Visual PinMAME (both available from Arcade@Home) to play. As for the game itself (and others), the Internet Pinball Database comes in handy. It also has a collection of shots of the machines, manuals, parts lists, links, etc.
posted by sysinfo at 11:57 PM on November 21, 2006 [1 favorite]

Left out that if you do pursue it, there are nearly 600 table recreations at VPForums, but you'll need to create an account to get them. They have what looks to be a much newer Doctor Who table, version 4.1 as opposed to the 1.2 I linked above. I just nuked my pinball emulation experiment, so I don't know what has improved.
posted by sysinfo at 12:09 AM on November 22, 2006

If you want to play the real thing and you live in London, the only real pinball machine I managed to find there was in a club called Clockwork on the corner of Penton Street and Pentonville Road. I make no guarantees that it's still there. 50p per game.
posted by Deathalicious at 12:23 AM on November 22, 2006

Oops; I see by your lat and long that you're a "British Geek", not a Geek who is also British. Nevermind.
posted by Deathalicious at 12:25 AM on November 22, 2006