Using Alternate Launcher in PinUp to run VPX 10.8

With all the Visual Pinball tables starting to appear requiring Visual Pinball 10.8, and Visual Pinball 10.8 still being in development or beta testing, I wanted to find a way to add Visual Pinball 10.8 to my system without effecting my existing Visual Pinball 10.7 installation I already have setup and working.

This article shows the steps I went through to get the Visual Pinball 10.8 64 bit version installed and the tables added to my PinUp Popper system using the Alternate Launcher settings in the Games Manager.

ALWAYS BACKUP ANY FILES YOU ARE REPLACING BEFORE YOU START MAKING CHANGES TO YOUR SYSTEM.

I am a Virtual Pinball hobbyist and cannot be responsible for your system if you are not familiar with Visual Pinball and PinUp Popper.
If this guide doesn’t work for you, I don’t want to be responsible for you having a non working Virtual Pinball machine.

If your an unsure. STOP NOW and do not go any further.

This guide assumes you are already familiar with Visual Pinball and PinUp Popper and will not be going into detail explaining everything about the system. If you are not familiar with Visual Pinball and PinUp Popper, you should not be following this guide.

First, you need to download the version of Visual Pinball you want to install. In my case, I downloaded the latest unofficial build, which was VPinballX 10.8.0 Build 1447 x64. You may be safer grabbing the latest official Beta build, but the choice is yours.

You can find the latest official beta release here: https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball/releases

Later builds are available but run a higher risk of causing issues. They can be found here: https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball/actions and then clicking on one of the titles marked as a Master build.

I would suggest that you backup any files you are going replace. Having copies of the files will allow you to restore your files back to how they were prior to attempting this process.

Inside the ZIP file you download will be the executable, in my case it was VPinballX64.exe, a few DLL files and a few folders. I extracted only the VPinballX64.exe file and then renamed it VPinballX108x64.exe so it wouldn’t conflict with the existing Visual Pinball 10.7 executable I already had installed. You can name the file anything you want.

Copy this file into your Visual Pinball folder. On my system this folder was C:\vPinball\VisualPinball. This was the default folder layout create by the All-in-one Baller Installer. Right or wrong, I did not copy any other files, and when I loaded the 10.8 tables, everything seemed to work.

Check in your Virtual Pinball folder, and if you don’t already have the other DLL files found in the ZIP, you should copy those files into the Visual Pinball folder.

Run the VPinballX108x64.exe executable and load one of the tables you are trying to run and check everything is working before going any further.

You also need to install vPinMAME 3.6 in order to run some, if not all the latest Visual Pinball 10.8 tables. To download the latest version of vPinMAME you need to go to the releases on GitHub.

You can find the latest official beta release here: https://github.com/vpinball/vpinball/releases.

Again, I would suggest that you backup any files you are going replace. Having copies of the files will allow you to restore your files back to how they were prior to attempting this process.

Inside the ZIP file you download there are four files you need to add into your vPinMAME folder, the folder would normally be C:\vPinball\VisualPinball\VPinMAME, if you installed using the Baller Installer.

The files are:

• Setup64.exe
• vPinMAME64.dll
• base64.dll
• VPMAlias.txt

Copy these files into your vPinMAME folder.

Run the Setup64.exe executable and click on the Install button.

I only installed the 64 bit version of VPX and vPinMAME. If you want to run the 32bit versions, you need to do the Visual Pinball and vPinMAME instructions again, but this time download and install the 32 versions using the same steps, but with the x32 files.

I have to updated my B2S Server to get everything working properly.  This involved moving the B2S Server to a different folder as well.

The first thing you need to do is download the latest version of B2S Server.

Go to https://github.com/vpinball/b2s-backglass/releases.

The latest version at the time of writing this guide was v2.0.3. You need to download the ZIP file in the Assets section beneath the change log.

Again, I would suggest that you backup any files you are going replace. Having copies of the files will allow you to restore your files back to how they were prior to attempting this process.

Create a B2SServer folder inside your Visual Pinball folder. For me, this was C:\vPinball\VisualPinball\. The new folder should be  C:\vPinball\VisualPinball\B2SServer\.

Open the ZIP file you download and copy all the files into the new B2SServer folder.

Go into the B2SServer folder and double click on B2SBackglassServerRegisterApp.exe.

You will be asked if you really want to re-register, click yes. A second prompt will appear asking if you want to register the new context menu items, just allow this as well.

Go back to your Tables folder and copy the ScreenRes.txt file into the new B2SServer folder.

You can now Delete the ScreenRes.txt file from your Tables folder.

In a normal setup from Baller Installer for example, your Plugins and Plugins64 folder would be inside your Tables folder. You need to move these two folders so they are now inside your new B2SServer folder (they are already there, just empty).

Now go back into your Tables folder and you can delete most of the old B2S Server files. Delete all the ones shown below except for the B2STableSettings.xml files.

Launch the PinUp Popper Setup programs (PinUpMenuSetup.exe).

Go into the Games Manager area.

Go into the Lookups tab and add your new Visual Pinball EXE filename into the Alternative Launcher.exe section. This will make it easier to update the new 10.8 tables by showing the choice in the alternative launcher dropdown. When you enter the name, remember to click Save Lists before you navigate away from this tab.

Go into the Add New Games tab and add the new tables and then navigate to the All Games tab.

Find the game you want to configure with an Alternative Launcher in the list of games on the left and click on it.

Choose the Alternative Launcher we added in the list earlier in the Alternative Launcher box on the lower right of the window.

Save your game and repeat this step for any games you want to configure for 10.8 beta.

That’s it. You can now exit the PinUp Popper Setup application and go back into the PinUpMenu to test out the new tables.

There’s a lot of other settings and controls for each game like adding media for the wheel images, but I’m not going into that here. The goal of this guide is to help you get the new Visual Pinball 10.8 beta tables running on your alongside your existing Visual Pinball 10.7 (or other version) software.

UPDATE 10/02/2023:

• Added section for Installing and Configuring B2S Server
  This Fixed DOF not working in 64bit VPX.

UPDATE 9/17/2023:

• Fixed some Typos.
• Tweaked some of the instructions to make them clearer.
• Added instructions for installing vPinMAME 3.6.