Editing Visual Pinball (section)

== History ==
Visual Pinball was released to the public on December 19, 2000 by programmer Randy Davis.

In 2005, David R. Foley purchased rights from Davis for modification of the suite for a full-sized pinball cabinet based on the Visual Pinball software.<ref name="ref1">[https://web.archive.org/web/20150924090321/http://www.retroblast.com/misc/vp_ultracade.html UltraCade Licenses Visual Pinball] from RetroBlast.com</ref> Chicago Gaming purchased rights for licensed tables from [[WMS Industries|Williams Electronics]]. The Visual PinMAME team and the Visual Pinball development community also joined in the effort to produce improvements to the suite product and a few tables. This project, known as [[UltraPin]], was acquired by [[Global VR]] following the acquisition of certain assets [[UltraCade]],<ref name="ref2">[https://web.archive.org/web/20060427091026/http://www.ultracade.com/press/145/global-vr-to-purchase-ultracade-technologies Global VR to Purchase UltraCade Technologies] from a web archive</ref> and was discontinued in 2008.

In 2008, NanoTech Entertainment acquired VP rights from Davis to use and distribute the engine with its ''Pinball Wizard'' PC Controller. They released version 9 of the engine back to the community, with many updates developed between 2005–2008. Version 9 includes major improvements, but incomplete backward compatibility, so some older tables still need VP version 8 to run properly.

In 2010, the [[source code]] of Visual Pinball 9.0.7 was released under a [[Software license|license]] allowing free non-commercial use, similar to the original [[MAME#License|MAME license]].<ref name="source" /> Davis and NanoTech are no longer involved in development as of (at least) version 9.0.8. Since then, development has been done by various [[open-source software|open-source]] contributors.

Visual Pinball X ("VPX") was released on December 24, 2015, again breaking [[backward compatibility]] with version 9; previously created tables can be loaded with it, but not played without changes. VPX brings significant improvements to graphics and the program's physics engine.

In 2025, the re-integration of the VPVR fork<ref>{{Cite web | url=https://sourceforge.net/projects/vpvr/ | title = Visual Pinball VR | date=22 December 2022}}</ref> into Visual Pinball 10.8.0 was finalized, which adds support for dynamic virtual camera movement, including [[Virtual reality headset]]s, and adding [[OpenGL]] as an alternative graphics API option. Due to the latter, Visual Pinball 10.8.1 (still in development) added support for operating systems other than Windows, including [[macOS]], [[iOS]], [[tvOS]], [[Linux]] (incl. the Batocera [[Linux distribution|distribution]]<ref name="Batocera">[https://batocera.org/ Batocera Linux distribution]</ref> and the [[Raspberry Pi]] platform) and [[Android (operating system)|Android]].<ref name="standalone">[https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball/tree/standalone Standalone source branch] at [[GitHub]]</ref> These versions for now omit (most of) the user interface for creating tables, and focus on simulating/playing existing tables.