What vPinOps is

vPinOps is the front end for a virtual pinball cabinet — what you see when the cab is on and nothing is being played. Your tables sit on a wheel, you pick one with the cabinet buttons, and when you quit the table you land back on the wheel. You never see the computer: no desktop, no menu bar, nothing to click your way out of.

No cab? It does the same job on a desktop — a first-class way to play, not a cut-down one.

What it does differently: the whole cabinet is managed from a browser or a phone on your own network. Volume, screens, the coin door, which tables show — without reaching behind the cab for a keyboard.

Pinball FX and Pinball FX Midnight sit on that same wheel, as ordinary entries. You scroll to one and press, exactly like a table.

It is not a rig installer. It does not install Visual Pinball, ROMs or DOF, and it does not take those over. You bring them; vPinOps is the layer over the top.

That is about scope, not a promise your current cabinet drops in

“We install nothing” and “point it at whatever you already run” are different claims, and only the first one is ours.

vPinOps needs Visual Pinball Standalone (BGFX), 10.8.1 or newer, and on that build DOF, PinMAME and the backglass are plugins inside Visual Pinball rather than separate programs. So on an older cabinet this is not a matter of pointing at what you have — you install that Visual Pinball first, and everything else follows from it. What you supply is the list.

And 10.8.1 is the bleeding edge of Visual Pinball, deliberately. It is where the unified [Backglass], [ScoreView] and [Topper] settings live, which is what lets one front end place your screens the same way on every platform — so that is what we build against, even though Visual Pinball still marks every 10.8.1 as a pre-release. It is under active development and things do move: settings have already changed section between 10.8.0 and 10.8.1, and a key written to the old place lands nowhere and fails silently. We track it, and expect this to keep changing while Visual Pinball changes.

What it does

• Builds your library in the Visual Pinball Standalone folder layout, and reads it from there — importing is what puts it in that shape, not something you do afterwards. Every .vpx it finds becomes a table, even one no database has heard of. See layout.
• Imports tables from a download folder or a .vpxz package, copying by default, and reports every file it could not place with the reason — see importing.
• Identifies tables against VPSdb — title, manufacturer, year — so a folder full of hand-renamed files comes out named properly.
• Fetches the frontend art from vpinmediadb: wheel, playfield, backglass, DMD art and video. It fills empty slots only, and never touches art you placed yourself.
• Writes the settings VPX reads, per table, immediately before it launches — so your screens end up where you put them.
• Launches Steam pinball games — Pinball FX and Pinball FX Midnight — as library entries, and returns you to the wheel the same way a table does. See Steam games.
• Serves OpsLink — the cab, on your phone. Browse and launch, set volume, work the coin door, place your screens, hold a table back. Any browser on your own network; nothing to install on the phone and nothing in the cloud. See OpsLink.
• Runs on Windows, macOS and Linux — and the library folder is identical on all of them, so a table you set up on one machine works on the others. See where things stand.

What it does not do

• It does not buy or install your Steam games. You own Pinball FX; vPinOps finds it and launches it through Steam.
• It does not download tables, ROMs or backglasses. Those are the playable pieces and you source them yourself.
• It does not open your archives. A .zip, .7z or .rar is listed for you to extract yourself. The one exception is *.vpx.zip.
• It does not diagnose a table. If a table will not run under Visual Pinball, that is between you, its author and any community compatibility patch. It will show you what it can — the reason a table is held, and any files Visual Pinball said it could not find — but working out why somebody else’s table misbehaves is not its job.
• It does not rename or overwrite media you placed yourself. When bulk import would have to create a table folder on top of one that already exists, it refuses rather than merging two tables into one — adding to a table you already have is a different thing, and that is exactly what a table’s own Files section is for — open the table in OpsLink and add to it.

It does copy and rename — deliberately

Import copies your files into a new structure and renames what has to be renamed — media, into the medias/ convention, and the backglass, onto a name Visual Pinball will find. Your originals stay where they are, untouched, and move is opt-in (copy → verify → delete, never a bare rename). But do not read this page as “nothing moves” — building the correct folder for a table is the job, and it is done with copies.

Two ways to run it — both first-class

Cabinet mode

A real virtual pinball cabinet: playfield, backglass and DMD each on their own display, played on the cabinet buttons.

Desktop mode

No cab. One screen — or several, if you have them: the backglass and DMD go on their own monitors just the same. Keyboard or gamepad. If you do not own a cabinet this is a first-class way to play, not a cut-down one.

The same vPinOps serves both. You do not install a different thing for each, and the screen layout page covers moving between them.

Why a front end at all

Visual Pinball plays the table. What it does not do is give you a couch-facing way to pick one, put the right art on the right screen, and get you back out again — on three operating systems, from one library folder that you can carry between machines.