History
Visual Pinball was first released to the public on December 19, 2000 by programmer Randy Davis.
In 2005, David R. Foley purchased the rights from Davis for modification of the suite for a full-sized pinball cabinet based on the Visual Pinball software. Chicago Gaming purchased rights for licensed tables from Williams Electronics. The Visual PinMAME team and the Visual Pinball development community also joined in the effort to produce improvements to the suite product and a few tables. This project, known as UltraPin, was acquired by Global VR following the acquisition of certain assets UltraCade, and was discontinued in 2008.
In 2008, NanoTech Entertainment acquired the rights from Davis for the use & distribution of the engine for inclusion with its Pinball Wizard PC Controller. NanoTech also released Version 9 of the engine featuring many updates that had been developed between 2005 and 2008. Version 9 of Visual Pinball includes some major improvements but not full backward compatibility therefore some older tables still need version 8 to run properly.
In 2010, the source code of Visual Pinball was released.
Read more about this topic: Visual Pinball
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