Quoted from Craig:

A potential selling point for me would be having a smaller machine that I could fit in a space that won't accommodate a full-sized pin. Does anyone have experience with one of the compact models? If (and I know that's a big "if") all else is the same, a smaller table might just be the thing that tips the balance the other way.

Quoted from Craig:

Thanks, Neo. I am going to get the dimensions for this thing and give it a serious look.

Quoted from Av8:

Play one first. One word. LAG.

Quoted from lowepg:

I think for the poll to be useful- you'd almost have to phrase it:
"For those that have ACTUALLY PLAYED a virtual cabinet, would you recommend one"
Otherwise you get a lot of misinformation from people who've simple not actually played one and/or extrapolating their experience playing on their (possibly misconfigured) desktop PC to what they "think" a cabinet would be like....

Quoted from Deaconblooze:

Neo - what kind of PC specs are you running? I'm wondering if my current setup would be sufficient to run my mini cab once I finally get it together..

Quoted from bub2010:

Speaking of which.. have you played tables that you like better in the VP world than real life? I have a real Avatar machine... and honestly once they tweak the flipper response on it I may like it better than the real deal. The sound and video on it are already pretty awesome plus it has the color extra DMD with video clips is really cool. I know some tables go for literal exact duplication and some do not. Avatar is a good example of one that used really good music choices... better than in the real Pin IMO.

Quoted from Roo:

No, I'm American - but I've had the nickname since I was a little kid because my real name is Andrew.
I did try one of the more recent versions of FP. The ball momentum seemed improved; it would actually accelerate as it fell down the table and move through the inlanes reasonably quickly. But the angles on shots from the flippers still seemed way off. It's like flipping with the ball 70% of the way down the flipper sends it at the same angle as 90%, but at 95% it's vastly different. I remember this was something that came up in the development thread for the new Unit3d Pinball title, too. They had a script they used to test that would drop balls down the inlane and have it flip automatically at different points with the intent of hitting a semi-circle of targets. They were able to hit every one, which was something they said they were never able to do in FP with the same script.
It was also literally impossible to do a post/slingshot pass when I tried it. It was like the base of the flipper somehow didn't have enough power when the ball was cradled. Maybe different versions are different, maybe some stuff varies by table, I don't know. More power to you if it works for you and is fun. That's one of the nice things about the commercial software though -- guaranteed consistent experience. It's not like I'm rooting against FP; the graphics are nice and like I said there are some cool tables.

Yeah, in VP there is a separate tilt threshold setting or something that controls how easy it is to get tilt warnings.
You should be able to see what I mean about the Nanotech if you go in to Game Controllers in Windows. You'll see the readout of the kit's "joystick" with a little plus sign wiggling instead of being still and it will occasionally spike to a high value. It's a problem for me because right now I'm using key mapping programs like Xpadder so I can nudge the cab to trigger the key presses for nudging in PBFX2 and TPA. I have to set the theshold fairly high because otherwise it would constantly nudge due to the jittering. But the occasional spikes still cause full strength nudges randomly at times, which is really annoying. I'm hoping with the VirtuaPin kit I can map the joystick directly to the right analog stick of an emulated Xbox 360 controller and have true analog nudging. Even if that doesn't work for some reason, I should at least be rid of the random nudges.
Also, regarding calibration - it sucked having to unscrew my Nanotech board so I could tilt and calibrate it. You must have a mini-cab because there was no way to tilt my 250 lb pincab to get an accurate calibration. Maybe if I had about 6 guys to help! I've even seen help threads discussing the art of getting a good calibration from these things. So in my book the auto-calibration will be a nice feature.
Sorry for going so far off topic; just trying to be clear on what I meant. Although this kind of brings up a point. If you want a virtual cab and are interesting in games like TPA or PBFX2 but aren't that computer savvy, it might be worth waiting to see what kind of full cabinet support they add for things like controls if you don't fancy messing around with keyboard and controller emulators. It should get easier and better-supported as time goes on.