+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 with a passionate, knowledgeable community.