Unreal Pinmame Connection
Welcome!
Enough of the core MAME API’s should be up and running to start putting together functional machines. API’s are still fluid, so expect to have to update and rebuild blueprints from time to time.
Current tasks: Ongoing refactoring and reorganizing. Fleshing
out the remainder of the API. Documentation/Examples.
Unreal-Visual-Pinball uses COM object (COM component) communications to interface with VPinMAME’s
DLL. When VPinMAME is properly installed, it sets up registry keys that tell COM where to find the DLL. If
those keys aren’t properly set up, the system will not run.
“…those tiki-torches must be kept lit…. those seeds must be kept warm…. if those seeds die…. we die!”
This is kind of standard practice for GitHub Unreal plugins, but it goes kind of like this:
Plugins folder in your project directory.Plugins folder..uproject file and select Generate Visual Studio Project FilesHuge thanks go to Datasung from bits4u.nl. He started the project
as an Unreal C++ code project and allowed me to jump in, convert it to an Unreal Plugin, and start implementing some more features and
ideas. We’re both big pinball fans — the art, the technology, the comradery — and of all the work that’s been done in the
visual/virtual pinball space.
Wanna play along? Help is welcome - you can contact me on my
discord server. I’m cptvideo.
We welcome contributions through GitHub Pull Requests
and Issues are open for any
enhancement suggestions and bugs reports. We try to adhere to Epic’s Coding Standards.
Greetings and welcome! First, a quick word of warning: This is an in-development project -
it is not ready for play-testing and no playable games have been built with it…😉 yet.
No, not yet. This is really just an early (pre-alpha) development project right now, so don’t worry, you’re
not missing anything :-) As soon as we have something that we can include here, we will.
Blueprints. The idea is that you set up “switch” events (button pushes, ball rollovers, etc.) that are passed to the ROM. The ROM sends back “solenoid” events
that you implement to fire off things like flipper movements, kickers, slingshots, etc.
The ROM is the firmware (program) burned into a chip on an IRL pinball machine. It’s the brains of ‘modern’ pinball
machines. The ROM manages game modes and progression, scorekeeping, sounds, lights, solenoids, DMD display output, and all the
other rando-electro-mechanical-dohickeys that make pinball so wonderful. The idea here is to provide a C++/Blueprint
interface to the ROMs so we can build virtual pinball machines in Unreal. In effect, this opens up a world of pinball
fun - not only running pinball machines as a game on a computer, but allowing us to design, modify, and build games that
could be built as physical machines in the real world; taking input from physical buttons on a cabinet, and sending signals
to fire real world things like, lights, flippers, & solenoids attached to pop-bumpers, etc.
Apparently so. I haven’t tried it yet, but there is this toolkit
for generating ROM images. If anyone is working with this and might be interested in building some simple test-fixture ROMs,
please contact me. These would be roms that do things like simply firing solenoid and light events, DMD diagnostics, and
processing input switches.
No, not yet :-)
Plugin logging happens under the log category, LogVPinball. You can filter the
Output Log to track plugin info and help with
installation problems.
To utilize this category in your own C++ game or plugin code,
include #include "<path>/E4_VPinMAME.h"
and put DEFINE_LOG_CATEGORY(LogVPinball); at the top of your source file. From
there you can use UE_LOG(LogVPinball, Log, TEXT("Test Log Message")); from within
your own source code. Change “Log” to whatever verbosity level you wish:
(Fatal|Error|Warning|Display|Log|Verbose|VeryVerbose).