From a few feet away the Global VR Ultrapin could easily be mistaken for a genuine pinball table. It's not until you step closer that you realise the cabinet houses a virtual pinball table with the tradtional play field replaced by a 32-inch 16:9 flat monitor. The machine is able to emulate several different real world tables including classics such as: Medieval Madness, Black Knight 2000, Fathom, F-14 Tomcat, PinBot, Eight Ball Champ, Attack from Mars, Strikes and Spares, Firepower, Funhouse, Xenon and Sorcerer. Ultrapin initially comes with 6 tables with others available as an addon pack.

One of the key features of the Ultrapin is its ability to process real world forces via its  "U-Shock" board. This allows you to interact with the table by pushing and knocking the cabinet which in turn effects the movement of the ball.

Whilst the Ultrapin is not cheap at a rumoured US$6500 it will certainly be far more economical to run compared to a traditional pinball machine. No longer will your investment require constant costly servicing as is the case with its real world counterpart.

Traditionalists may shy away from this new technology but its hard to deny that the Ultrapin will likely introduce pinball to a whole new generation of players, and that can't be all bad.

More info available at GlobalVR

"Rickula" from over at the Future Pinball forums has come up with a way to implement reverse sloped basements in Future Pinball. This opens up the way for recreations of classic tables such as Haunted House and is big news for the FP community, at least in my opinion. Read the forum thread and add your own remarks here:

www.futurepinball.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2018

Hot on the tail of Future Pinball's latest update last week comes yet another release taking the version number to 1.6b.20061029 . This one should keep owners of older video cards happy as it includes a fix for none shader compatible cards. Chris says, "I've uploaded 1.6b.20061029 which contains a non shader dmd object, some fixes, some new hole models (for the em kicker) and other changes".

Visit www.futurepinball.com for the latest update.

"Larsboy", an avid table designer and active member of the Future Pinball Forum noticed a new addition in the manual that went unmentioned in the release notes of the latest Future Pinball release.

The unannounced feature is the ability to create balls of varying colours (although it seems only metallics are possible)

MyKicker.CreateBall 255,0,0 creates a red ball.
MyKicker.CreateBall 0,255,0 creates a green ball.
MyKicker.CreateBall 0,0,255 creates a blue ball.

Naturally you can also create other colours by adjusting the RGB values. However it is still not possible to create a white ball with 255,255,255 as it is just seen as having no colour at all and thus is simply rendered silver. 

Future Pinball (the amazing free pinball editor/engine) has just received a very welcome update, the new version is 1.6.20061022 and highlights include a new DMD manager complete with bitmap font creator, support for 16:9 aspect screens, GLSL Shader Support, Enamel Mapping option to Surfaces, Light Image support, dirty ball texture, Ball against Ball Hit sound effect, 50 New and Improved Models, Motor Power and Damping properties to the spindisk object, Support for TrackIR head tracking unit (WOW!) plus many more bug fixes and additions. The downside is the new version requires a Video card with GLSL Shader support. Anything less (and including) a Geforce 4 will not work, the price of progress I guess.

Get the updated file at www.futurepinball.com .  Those of you with a Torrent client installed can join the torrent and help take some of the load off of Chris' server by seeding for as long as you can, even a few hours of seeding will help out.

Unfortunately my host has decided to implement some restrictions on my server which are causing issues with downloads.A time limit of 60 seconds now applies for file downloads. Unless you are on a fast connection and can get the entire file within this time limit then you will not be able to download a complete file.

Apologies to those of you on dialup and even some slower ADSL connections who will have problems with this restriction. I am currently working on ways to get around this issue and hopefully full file access will be restored to all users soon.

 If you are unable to complete a file, please do not keep trying with the same file over and over again as this only uses up bandwidth for others and its unlikely you will get the file if it isn't successful the first time. Try a smaller file instead.