The wheel
The wheel is the front end: a row of tables you move through with the flipper buttons, the selected one showing its playfield video while its neighbours show stills.
What you see
Section titled “What you see”| Wheel | Built from each table’s (Wheel) logo. No logo, no problem — the title stands in. |
| Playfield | The selected table’s (Playfield) video, or its still. |
| Backglass and DMD | On a cabinet, on their own screens. On a desktop, in the layout you chose. |
| The tray | Tables that need attention — a missing ROM, an unreadable file — kept off the wheel until they are fixed. |
Launch and return
Section titled “Launch and return”This is the loop every front end gets wrong, so it is worth stating what “right” means here:
- You press Enter on a table.
- vPinOps writes the display settings that table needs, immediately before launch.
- Visual Pinball starts and takes the screens.
- You quit the table.
- You are back on the wheel — the desktop, the menu bar and focus never showed through.
The tray
Section titled “The tray”A table that failed its last launch is held: it comes off the wheel and into the tray, with the reason. That is deliberate — a broken table on the wheel is a trap, and you would have no way to tell a table you have not tried from one that does not work.
Fixing it is a two-step: fix the cause, then clear the old verdict so the next launch decides afresh — the button is “Forget this verdict” on the table’s page in OpsLink. See when a ROM goes wrong.
Seeing it from the cabinet itself
Section titled “Seeing it from the cabinet itself”You do not need another device to find out something is wrong, or to get to the one that fixes it. Two of the wheel’s own actions are for exactly this:
| action | default key | what it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Attention | T | The tables that need you, and why — the same held reasons as the tray |
| OpsLink | M | This cabinet’s address on your network and its password, so you can open OpsLink on a phone or laptop and fix things there |
Both are actions, not hotkeys — they are in the same list as Play and Quit, so you can bind them
to cabinet buttons and reach them with no keyboard at all. That matters on a real cab, where T and
M are not available to you.
Validation
Section titled “Validation”A table’s state is one of three:
| Unchecked | Never launched. On the wheel. |
| Validated | Launched and played cleanly. On the wheel. |
| Held | Failed, with a named reason. In the tray, off the wheel. |
Nothing about this state is written into your table folder — it lives in vPinOps’ own config.