Tutorial 2

Pinner Management

Pinner Management is the cabinet's web-based control panel. You reach it from your phone or laptop and use it to enable game pages, download tables you own from Williams or Zen Pinball Studios, sign into Google, link your cabinet to the leaderboard, configure graphics, set up the backglass, and more. Below is a fully clickable simulator of the real interface, then a walkthrough of every card.

📌 Read this first — Table Ownership

If you're planning to buy any additional pinball tables for your cabinet, read the Table Ownership section below before spending any money. There are very specific rules about which apps, which app store, and which Google account — and tables bought the wrong way will not show up on your cabinet, even though they look identical to the right ones.

Table Ownership — how buying tables works

Your cabinet's stock pages (Marvel, Star Wars, Williams, Pinball Arcade) come with their tables bundled — enable a page in Page Configuration, confirm legal rights, and the cabinet downloads and installs those tables automatically. You don't need to do anything else for the stock tables.

The rest of this section is about buying additional tables beyond the stock bundle. The cabinet uses Google Play license records to know what you own, which means there are strict rules about how you have to buy them.

🛑 How to buy tables that will actually sync to your cabinet

Every additional table must be purchased through Google Play on an Android device, in one of these two specific apps:

⚠ Other Zen Studios apps are NOT compatible. Tables you buy in any of the following will not show up on your cabinet, even though many of them appear to be the same tables:

These are all different products from the Zen Pinball / Williams Pinball apps the cabinet uses. Make sure you're buying in the apps named exactly "Zen Pinball" or "Williams™ Pinball" by Zen Studios — use the links above to land on the right app.

No Android phone or tablet? Run an Android emulator on your computer.

You can install an Android emulator on your PC or Mac, sign in to it with the same Google account you'll use on the cabinet, install Zen Pinball and/or Williams™ Pinball inside the emulator, and buy your tables there. The cabinet's "Get Owned Tables" buttons will then sync those purchases right in.

On Windows — use Google's own official option:

On Mac — Google Play Games for PC isn't available, so use a third-party emulator:

Whichever emulator you pick, the workflow is identical: install it → sign into Google Play with the account that will own your cabinet's tables → install Zen Pinball / Williams Pinball from inside the emulator → buy tables → then come back to the cabinet, sign in with the same account, and click Get Owned Zen / Williams Tables.

🛑 Important: which Google account?

When you sign into the cabinet, use the same Google account that owns those Zen Pinball / Williams Pinball purchases on Google Play. Buying with one account and signing into the cabinet with another won't work — table licenses are tied to whichever account paid for them.

Purchases made on iOS, Steam, Switch, or PlayStation can't be detected by the cabinet at all — only Google Play licenses are accessible. The iOS versions of these apps don't sync ownership back to Google Play, even when you sign in with the same email. If your existing purchases were made anywhere other than Google Play on Android, you'll need to repurchase the ones you want.

🛑 No manual loading, no SD-card cloning, no resale

Pinner does not allow you to manually load tables. There's no sideload path — no .pxp drag-and-drop, no USB import, no developer mode. Every playable table either ships in the cabinet's stock bundle or is fetched from your verified Google Play licenses by the buttons in this card. This is deliberate.

Why: earlier softmods allowed manual table loading, and people abused that — selling USB drives full of pirated tables on resale sites. That cost Zen Studios and Williams revenue they're entitled to. Pinner removed the path entirely so the tables you play are tables you legitimately own. This is a measure to protect the IP holders, and it's a hard line in the product, not a setting that can be flipped.

Cloning the SD card to copy your tables onto another cabinet — or sharing a clone with someone else — will cause the cabinet to stop working, and may get the affected accounts banned from using the product entirely.

The PinnerOPI software is for use on Arcade1Up virtual pinball cabinets only. Reselling the software, copies of it (Etsy / similar), or operating it outside of an Arcade1Up virtual pinball cabinet is a violation of our Terms of Service. Pinner is, first and foremost, a repair product for that specific cabinet — not a general-purpose softmod or pinball platform.

What about discontinued tables?

Some Zen tables that used to be sold in the Zen Pinball phone app have been pulled from Google Play over the years (usually due to licensing changes). You can't buy or re-license those in any app today, but Pinner ships them itself — see Download Discontinued Zen Tables in the walkthrough below.

⚠ Table compatibility — not every table is supported yet

Williams: LCD-based tables (no DMD) are not currently supported.

Some tables in the Williams Pinball app use an LCD display rather than a proper dot-matrix display (DMD). The current PinnerOS release can't render those correctly. Affected titles include:

The good news: most of these are also available in Pinball Arcade (PBA), which is one of the stock pages — so the cabinet can play them via PBA instead. Just enable the Pinball Arcade page in Page Configuration.

Indiana Jones is the exception — it isn't in PBA. Williams support for it on the cabinet may come in a future update.

Backglass-dependent tables may have issues in the current release.

A few tables play part of the game on the backglass rather than the playfield. The current release has known issues handling those backglass segments — this affects both the Williams and Pinball Arcade versions of:

If you specifically want to play one of these tables, check the Team Encoder Discord for the current status before counting on it. Improvements to the backglass-segment rendering are an ongoing area of work.

📅 Coming later — Visual Pinball X Standalone support

We're working toward adding support for Visual Pinball X Standalone tables to the cabinet. When that ships, the install workflow will look different from the current Zen / Williams flow — and intentionally separated from it:

No timeline yet. We'll announce on the Team Encoder Discord when it's ready and add a full tutorial here at that point.

How to reach Pinner Management

  1. Boot the cabinet and let it land on the Pinner Launcher.
  2. Scroll to the last tile in the launcher — it shows a QR code.
  3. Scan the QR code with your phone's camera (any modern phone). It contains a URL that looks like http://<cabinet-ip>:8080/.
  4. Open the link. The page below appears in your phone's browser. Your phone must be on the same WiFi as the cabinet.
No QR scanner?

You can also type the URL by hand. The launcher tile shows the IP address — just open a browser and type http://192.168.x.x:8080 (using your cabinet's actual IP) to land on the same page.

Try the simulator

This is the actual interface served by the cabinet. Every button, toggle, and slider works — calls are intercepted with mocked responses so you can preview the full flow without a real cabinet. Hover any control for a quick description of what it does. Scroll inside the frame to see every card.

Pinner Management · simulator
Demo:

Walkthrough — what each card does

1. System Information

Read-only summary of your cabinet. Useful when troubleshooting in Discord — you'll often be asked for these values.

Device ModelAlways OrangePi 5 Max for a working kit.
Android Version14 on current builds.
Serial NumberUnique per cabinet. This is what links your cabinet to your account on the leaderboard.
UptimeHow long since the cabinet last booted.
SD Card SpaceFree space remaining on the SD card. If this drops low, table downloads will start failing.
CPU TemperatureLive SoC temp. Anything under ~70°C is normal. Sustained 80°C+ means your cooler isn't seated right.

2. Page Configuration — what's a "page"?

A page is a category of pinball tables in the launcher. Each page is its own world: Marvel and Star Wars hold the licensed Zen tables for those franchises, Williams is the licensed Williams Pinball Collection, Pinball Arcade covers the Pinball Arcade (PBA) tables, and Zen Pinball is where the rest of the Zen catalog lives.

1

Start Page

The page the launcher opens to first when the cabinet boots. Pick whichever you play most.

2

Available Pages

Check the boxes for pages you want available in the launcher. Unchecked pages stay hidden. The first time you check a box, a "Legal Rights Confirmation" modal appears — once you confirm, the cabinet does the rest.

What happens when you enable a page

For Marvel, Star Wars, Williams, and Pinball Arcade, confirming ownership triggers the cabinet to automatically download and install the stock tables for that category. You don't sideload anything — it's all handled for you.

The Zen Pinball page comes empty by default. It's the home for any additional Zen tables you own beyond the stock pages — those are pulled in from your Google Play account via the buttons in Card 4 below.

⚠ Legal note

Confirming ownership is your assertion that you legally own the underlying table software. The cabinet uses that confirmation to authorize the automated downloads.

3. System Controls

🔧 Reboot Cabinet

Soft reboot. Useful after big config changes or if the launcher gets stuck.

🔄 Check for Pinner Updates

Forces an OTA check immediately instead of waiting for the next scheduled poll. If a newer version is found, an Apply Update button appears right below it; if you're already current, it just tells you so. See OTA Updates for the full picture.

⬇️ Apply Update

Only appears after a check finds a newer version. Click it to download and install — progress streams live right in the panel ("Installing an update…", "Update applied successfully."). The cabinet may restart when it finishes.

📝 Change Log

Pops up the notes for the latest Pinner release — what changed and when it was published, pulled from the Team Encoder update server. Handy for seeing what a pending update will actually do before you apply it.

🔧 Launch Diagnostics

Opens the PinnerDiag app on the cabinet TV — button tests, screen and serial checks, and other hardware diagnostics. The cabinet display hands over to the diagnostics tool until you finish. The diagnostics app isn't exited with the Right Flipper + Launch combo — instead, work through all of its prompts to the end and it returns you to the launcher on its own.

🎮 Super Sampling — 4K vs 2K

Renders the game at higher-than-display resolution and downsamples for cleaner edges. 4K looks best but is heavy on the SoC — only enable if your CPU temp stays low. 2K is the sweet spot for most cabinets. You can only have one mode active at a time, and enabling either pops a performance-risk confirmation first.

✨ MSAA 4x

Multi-sample anti-aliasing — softens jagged edges with much less GPU cost than super-sampling. Stack on top of 2K SSAA for the best balance of quality and performance. Like Super Sampling, it asks you to accept the performance risk before turning on.

4. Get Your Tables — the Google sign-in flow

This card is for tables beyond the stock cabinet bundle. The stock pages (Marvel, Star Wars, Williams, Pinball Arcade) install their tables automatically when you enable the page. This card is what you use when you've also bought additional Zen Pinball or Williams tables on your phone — it syncs those purchases from your Google Play account onto the cabinet, and it's also where you grab the discontinued Zen tables Pinner bundles fixes for.

Because this pulls from your Google Play account, you have to sign in first.

📌 Buying tables? Read Table Ownership first

Before clicking Sign into Google or buying any new tables, read Table Ownership at the top of this page. It covers which apps are compatible (Zen Pinball / Williams Pinball — not Pinball FX or FX GO), the official Google Play Games for PC emulator option if you don't have an Android phone, and which Google account to use.

⚠ "This device isn't certified by Google" at sign-in?

Some cabinets show "This device is not Play Protect certified" (or "This device isn't certified") when you try to sign into Google. That's Google declining sign-in on a device whose Google Services Framework (GSF) ID isn't on its certified list yet. Nothing is wrong with your cabinet — it just needs to be registered with Google once.

The fix is built right into this card — register before you sign in:

  1. Copy your GSF ID The card shows the cabinet's Google Services Framework ID — a short hex string. Click Copy to put it on your clipboard.
  2. Click "Register Device to Google" This opens Google's device-registration page in a new tab. Sign in there with the same Google account you'll use on the cabinet.
  3. Paste the GSF ID and submit Paste the ID you copied into the registration field and register the device.
  4. Wait — up to a day Google can take up to 24 hours to certify the device. Once it propagates, the "not certified" error goes away and you can sign in normally. If sign-in still fails right after registering, give it time and try again later.

Never saw a certification error? You can skip this entirely — go straight to Sign into Google below.

Sign-in walkthrough

  1. Click "Sign into Google" A confirmation modal warns that you can only sign in once. Cabinet flips to the Google sign-in screen on the cabinet's Android system.
  2. The Google sign-in page Pinner Management now shows a page that mirrors the cabinet's Android sign-in screen as a live screenshot. Tap on the screenshot to interact — every tap is sent to the cabinet's touchscreen layer. There's a Type / Backspace / Back / Refresh control panel underneath.
  3. Sign in normally Email → password → 2FA prompt if your account uses one. The cabinet refreshes the screenshot every half-second so you see the login progress in real time.
  4. "click here" to return Once Google says "Signed in", tap the "click here" link in the page header to return to the main Pinner Management interface.
  5. Now the table buttons work With a signed-in Google account, "Get Owned Zen Tables" and "Get Owned Williams Tables" can sync your Google Play purchases to the cabinet — any tables you own beyond the stock bundle get downloaded and installed automatically. A progress bar shows live status.

The controls on this card

GSF ID & Register Device to Google

Shows the cabinet's Google Services Framework ID with a Copy button, plus Register Device to Google. Use these only if sign-in reports the device isn't certified — see "This device isn't certified" above. Registering can take up to a day to take effect.

Sign into Google

Opens the screen-mirror sign-in page described above. Only needed once per cabinet.

Clear Google Account(s)

Removes every Google account on the cabinet and reboots it. Use this if you signed in with the wrong account on the first try.

Get Owned Zen Tables

Syncs your Google Play purchases for Zen Pinball / Marvel / Star Wars onto the cabinet. Anything you bought in the phone version of those apps that wasn't already part of the stock bundle gets downloaded here. Progress bar shows live status; the button locks while running.

Get Owned Williams Tables

Same as above but for the Williams Pinball Collection — pulls in any Williams tables you own beyond the stock bundle.

Download Discontinued Zen Tables

Some tables that used to be available in the Zen Pinball phone app have been pulled from Google Play over time (usually because of licensing changes) and are no longer purchasable. Because Google Play no longer sees them, the Owned Tables buttons above can't reach them either. Pinner ships those discontinued tables itself — click this button, confirm legal rights, and the discontinued pack installs straight to the cabinet.

5. Pinball Arcade Management

These controls fine-tune how Pinball Arcade (PBA) tables play. They only affect PBA — Zen and Williams tables have their own nudge and plunger settings inside each table's own in-game options menu, so adjust those during play.

Nudge Sensitivity

Slider from 1 to 10 — higher = more responsive to a physical nudge, with the sweet spot around 5. (This replaces the old "Gyro Sensitivity" control.) If nudging barely moves the ball, raise it; if the ball flies on a light tap, lower it.

Plunger User Strength

Fine-tunes plunger launch power from 0.80× to 1.20×, with 1.00× as stock. Use it to compensate for your cabinet's plunger spring tension and wear — nudge it up if launches feel weak, down if they're too hot.

Achievement Popups

Toggles a small "goal completed" toast on screen during PBA play when you hit a table objective. Purely cosmetic — turn it off if you'd rather keep the screen clean.

6. Leaderboards

Connects your cabinet to pinball.team-encoder.com for online high scores.

  1. Click "Link Cabinet to Leaderboard" Opens the Team Encoder leaderboard signup page in a new tab, with your cabinet's serial number passed along automatically. You sign up (or sign in if you already have a Team Encoder leaderboard account), then the site issues an API token tied to your cabinet.
  2. Copy the token It's a 48-character hex string. Copy it from the leaderboard page.
  3. Paste & Save Back in Pinner Management, paste it into API Token and click 💾 Save API Token. The card validates the format (48 hex chars only) before saving.
  4. Done Your scores will now post to the online leaderboard. The token also unlocks the backglass leaderboard widget if you have a backglass installed.

7. Backglass Display

The Backglass card configures an optional secondary display for art, videos, and live leaderboard overlays during play. It runs on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W connected over USB serial. Backglass is community-driven and not part of the base Pinner kit — see the dedicated Backglass Tutorial for hardware, software install, and a per-toggle walkthrough of this card.

Backglass settings stay hidden until you enable it

The card's options stay collapsed until you flip Enable Backglass on — just to keep things tidy on kits without one. If you don't have a Pi Zero 2 W connected, the connection-status line will show "Not connected — PP Enhancer not found". That's fine; the toggles are inert and nothing on the card affects normal cabinet play.

Things that aren't on this card (yet)

Next: Adding the optional backglass display →