Ok, title says it all. The game installed fine, but no matter which compatability mode I run the game in, I never get anywhere. The screen stays black about 10 seconds, then I get back to windows (vista, 64-bit, radeon 3870x2, 4 gig ram) with a message saying:
"Blt() failed (88760037) "ERROR" in \pinball3\src\pc\win\display\ddraw.c:1601"
This doesn't help me much, apart from suspecting that it's connected to directdraw somehow. Any tips? I thought I would at least get it started since that's what GOG specializes in, this is pretty annoying. Timeshock works fine, but that's the dos version.

The problem has been solved! Thanks to the support team on GOG I tried disabling "Catalyst AI" in the Catalyst control center for my graphics card, and now the game works perfect!

I had the same problem. I solved it by creating an application profile in ATI CC for the game exe, used default settings in the profile and disabled Xfire. No other changes were needed. ATI drivers 13.1