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.

Think of it as a media player for your tables. Scroll through your library, press play, play the table, and quit — and you are back in your library, exactly where you were. No file browser, no folders, and you never see the computer: no desktop, no menu bar, nothing to click your way out of. On a cabinet the scrolling and the playing are your cabinet buttons.

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 — the operator menu a real machine hides behind it, where you set things like the ROM’s own volume — and which tables show. Without reaching behind the cab for a keyboard. That surface is called OpsLink.

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.

What it needs. Visual Pinball Standalone (BGFX), 10.8.1 or newer. 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.

Why 10.8.1, and not the stable one. It is where the unified [Backglass], [ScoreView] and [Topper] settings live — what lets one front end place your screens the same way on every platform. Visual Pinball still marks every 10.8.1 as a pre-release, and we build against it anyway.

What that costs. It moves. 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 a table at a time, a .vpx or a .vpxz package, sent from any device on your network. The rest of a table’s files are added to it by hand, into the slot you choose, so nothing is guessed — see importing.
• Identifies tables against VPSdb — title, manufacturer, year — so a hand-renamed file comes out named properly. And the name on the wheel is yours to edit afterwards.
• 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 and macOS, with Linux in the works — 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 an 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.

That is the job. If it plays your table and brings you back to the wheel, it is working; everything else on this site is about doing that with less standing sideways at the cabinet.