the old DOS + Win 95 / XP
pinball simulations on CD

I guess my oldest bought pinsim is Pinball Magic from 1989 on a 3,5 disc! Same goes for Crystal Caliburn (1993), Eight Ball Deluxe (1994) as well as Screamball (1993) on 5 discs running under DOS on a 80486 or compatible with 33Mhz or better!

Before this first steps with playable pinsims were made the existing ones were usually unplayable and with simple layouts,  poor graphics and more or less unnatural physics why I call them trash, the first days of pinball simulation!

The start of Windows 95 didn´t automatically ment that a pinsim would run under windows, until about 1998 still most pinsims ran under DOS. Several CD´s for XP will be running even under win10 (1909). Often the testing is long ago so the pinsims might not run on the present system. I listed the system requirements asked by the CD and without guarantee on what newer win version (10-2004) I got them running.

Emulators were made of the still large dosgame community. DOSBox simulates a PC of the necessary speed, so that several (not all) old DOS pinsims can be played again as earlier. There existed some other programms trying to slow down the CPU but I never tried these.

3D view didn´t exist in the beginning. Worse, many tables had a scrolling playfield (sometimes with the alternative to change to unscrolling smaller bird view). You have to aim without sight for targets ramps etc. in the upper part and your eyes were strained to the limit. The alternative were playfields/views as high as the screen then usually about half the width. An angled view taking advantage of full screenwidth came already in 1996 but stayed a speciality of few pinsims for still a long time.

Sierra started in 1996 with 3D views of playfields using the whole screen in width. A real appearence of a 3D view of a table was very well performed by Empire when starting the Pro Pinball series with their first pinsim.

Timeshock released 1997 with excellent graphics, physics and a table layout you could expect from a real pinball machine.
Pure Pinball might outperform it with a still more brilliant graphic but Timeshock stays in my opinion the best pinsim there is.

Again it seems Sierra who first used animated targets, in 1997 Wildfire followed with Balls of Steel. Oddly enough, animated + moving targets remained a rarity. Actually that should have been the chance and advantage of PC pinball simulations against real machines for layout and gamefun.

Astonishing that implemented videogames started even before 1996. More frequently in 1997+98 in Timeshock, Judge Dredd and Pinball Addiction. Some of the videogames are really tricky and need some practice to master.

It seems strange to me that software developers still produced scrolling pinsims after the Pro Pinball releases. Realistic ball physics seems to be for some of them still unprogrammable. They are getting closer but still don`t quite catch up to the Pro Pinball series, Pure Pinball or Thrillride of Sierra, Lttle Wing or the freeware Visual and Future Pinball! So you won´t be sure what you will get when buying a pinsim on CD. My review might help a bit.

01/2021