PC Pinball Simulations

Epic logo I have designed PC pinball games for Epic MegaGames in my spare time. I worked initially with Epic "consulting" for Silverball, a retail game released by Micro League, and also helped out on Epic Pinball. I designed the Pot of Gold table from the first set. Most recently I designed 3 of the tables for Extreme Pinball, including Rock Fantasy (the shareware table), Monkey Mayhem, and Urban Chaos.

I also designed some others that have not been implemented (and if you wish to buy them for your upcoming award winning pinball game, whether it be real or virtual, please contact me). 'There is no substitute for quality'.

Extreme Pinball for the PC and Sony Playstation

Extreme Pinball for the PC was released November 10th, 1995 by Epic. The game was also being sold retail in stores by Electronic Arts. You may still be able to purchase the game in the "gold edition" packaging. The game was ported to the Sony Playstation platform and released there about March, 1996.

You can download the shareware version of Extreme Pinball (featuring the Rock Fantasy table) from many shareware sites.

Running Extreme Pinball and Epic Pinball on Modern PCs

If you are like me, you might want to occasionally run old DOS-based games originally intended for Intel 386 and 486 PCs running Windows 3.1 or Windows 95. If you try running them directly on modern Pentium PCs running Windows 98, 2000, XP or Vista, the games generally fail for a variety of reasons.

However, recently I stumbled across a great DOS emulator program that seems to run these old games easily and smoothly: Dosbox. Dosbox actually emulates all machine instructions and thus provides a "sandbox" for the old games to run in. I downloaded the program (about 1.2MB) and within two or three minutes I was running Extreme Pinball on Windows XP Pro (and later on Windows 2000).

Therefore, I recommend you download Dosbox and get your old games running! They have a large list of supported games on the website, including Extreme Pinball and Epic Pinball.

Following are the basic things I did to get the game going again.

Download Dosbox from dosbox.com. About 1.2mb.
Run the downloaded .exe file and install Dosbox in a directory of your choosing.
Execute Dosbox. It will run as (naturally) a DOS program.
You can read instructions, etc. But all you need to do is issue a mount command to map your Extreme Pinball (or other game) location to a Dosbox "virtual" drive letter like c. So for example, if Extreme is installed in C:\games\pinball on your hard drive, you would issue a command like "mount c C:\games\pinball".
Switch to the virtual drive you set up in the mount instruction above. So in the above example, enter "c:". Your current Dosbox directory is now c:, which maps to your Extreme Pinball location. Enter a "dir" command and you should see all of the Extreme Pinball files.
Run setup.exe in Dosbox and pick some stereo sound option. Not sure how picky you need to be here.
Run extreme.exe. The game should start up and run now.

Disclaimer: the above solution may or may not work for you. I really can't help you solve problems encountered, but if you do get it running and had to take other actions I would be interested to know what you did. Thanks.

Running Extreme Pinball on Playstation 1

If you have the Playstation version of Extreme Pinball, I can verify that it does run on a new PS3. It doesn't run great but it does run.

Rock Fantasy Rules

The shareware version you download didn't have any rules for Rock Fantasy associated with it. Fortunately, you can get the Rock Fantasy rules here. An official version of these rules was also at the Epic web site. But since I created the page for them my version is probably good.

The Java Rock Fantasy interactive playfield map is even better.

When you bought the complete package from Epic, you got a color booklet with an overview of the rules for all games, plus major playfield components identified. The Electronic Arts package did not (I believe) contain as much information about game rules. I wrote the text for the rules included with the Epic package, so can answer questions for the 3 games I worked on.

Unreal

The actual company that did the programming and art for Extreme Pinball is Digital Extremes in Waterloo, led by James Schmalz (the major force behind Epic Pinball). They, along with Epic and several other talented game folks released Unreal.

Last updated: January 15, 2008