djrobx

I had the problem the OP had also with writing the incorrect number, which I worked around by disabling ScreenRes writing. But now with WIndows 10 1803, my system no longer maintains display numbers consistently. The backglass monitor may be ID #1 for two reboots in a row, then on the next restart #1 will be my DMD monitor, and #2 is my BG monitor. The displays keep their positions and resolutions fine, just the display ID numbering is inconsistent. I made an update to the B2S Backglass Server that allows the 4th line to be "@"+ the X starting location of the BG. This removes the dependency on display ID#s in VPX. You can find that here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1JSEMX6rOkoA8fYcKxY5MUcZEHXIjm38I/view?usp=sharing Tom, you may want to consider offering a similar approach (using coordinates instead of display #s) in PinballX.

LOL, yep, blurry! I am only using a 29" 4k monitor, it's probably even more noticeable on the 40"+ that a lot of folks are using. I think it has less to do with 1080p quality and more to do with how the video is being stretched to fit the native resolution. No fancy upscale algorithm here (not that I would expect one). And yeah, I definitely remember those 70lb trinitron 24" monitors. Man they were pretty in their time, but I don't miss trying to lift those suckers. I used to install them into touch-screen kiosk systems. Indeed. I think anything that goes wrong with a virutal pinball cabinet should be classified as a first world problem, though. Thanks Tom! That's what we needed to know, that hardware decoding isn't currently supported. That explains why DXVA never shows that it's working. And you're right - there isn't much overall performance difference between hardware-decode (CUDA) and software decode in my tests. I'm happy with my low-FPS video solution for now.

On my system (Ryzen 1300X + GTX960), with LAV filters, PinballX is *SUPER SLOW* with 4k video (DMD+PF only, no BG). I had to convert the videos to 3FPS in order for it to be usable. I encoded as yuv420p which allowed LAV's CUDA mode to start working, but it made very little difference. DXVA won't pick them up for some reason. Here are the encoding lines I'm using. If someone has something that works better for 4k I'm all ears, but I find this preferable to blurry 1080p video or 4k stills. (capture) Run, "%FFMpegPath%\ffmpeg" -y -t %RecTime% -rtbufsize 1500M -f gdigrab -framerate 3 -offset_x 0 -offset_y 0 -video_size %PF_width%x%PF_Height% -i desktop -vcodec libx264 -preset ultrafast -qp 0 -threads 8 "%A_ScriptDir%\playfield.mkv",,Hide UseErrorLevel (encode) Run, "%FFMpegPath%\ffmpeg" -y -i "%A_ScriptDir%\playfield.mkv" -ss 5 -to 1000 -vf %PFRotation% -c:v libx264 -pix_fmt yuv420p -crf 30 -profile:v baseline -level 3.0 -qscale:v 5 "%MediaOutPath%\%MediaSubDirOut%\Table Videos\%SearchString%.%RecExt%",,UseErrorLevel

Moved to feature requests as suggested.

If we are changing the loading screens, can we get transparency support for the main loading screen also? I still haven't gotten used to PinballX's black loading screen. In hyperpin it just puts a nice small "Please wait ... " over top of the table image, which just becomes the table when it's ready. It flows much nicer that way. Thanks for considering!

Doing exactly that, I noticed that PinballX's wheel movement is now BUTTERY smooth. It used to have a bit of stutter to it. It also seems to start up about 3x faster. So it seems whatever was going on was actually impacting PinbalX itself. By the way, your suggestion to check out / update the .NET framework was a good one I hadn't really thought of. Could very well have been the culprit. I guess I won't worry about it now and just be happy it finally is working right. Thanks for your help everyone!

Whelp, I did a Windows 10 upgrade-install (not a clean wipe). I wanted to keep as much of the config the same as possible to see if the OS itself would make a difference all else being equal I was surprised at how well it kept my settings and such. It pretty much kept eveything in-tact except the DMD monitor resolution. Now I get a steady 317FPS under PinballX. So whatever the problem was, it went away with the upgrade. Yay?!? My Windows 8.1 install was pretty fresh, I had done a clean install maybe 3 or 4 months ago. So weird.

I'm at the point of trying anything and everything. I'm happily accepting "catch all BS suggestions". Yep I've tried running PBX as admin and not as admin. I later tried EnableLUA=0 to make sure the whole UAC/user account thing wasn't involved. No change. In fact one of the reasons I was trying to stick with Windows 8.1 is that EnableLUA=0 doesn't work as well on Win10. I really hate UAC. I'm installing win10 now and we'll see what happens. I'm not hopeful but ya never know.

Hi Tom, thanks for checking on it. I have an SSD also. I did check the RAM (it's now 8gb and going from 4 to 8 didn't make the slightest difference). It's seriously a strange problem. The resource monitor shows PinballX not using any CPU, so it makes zero sense why it has such an impact. Another data point is that the game starts out running fine, but after 2-3 seconds the performance dips. It will sometimes oscillate upwards but stays draggy. I've messed around with the Nvidia Control panel settings too. They can affect the frame rate, but don't really matter in terms of the PinballX difference. I never install the GeForce experience stuff. I FIRST observed this issue with VPX when testing Scared Stiff. I think I never noticed problems on PhysMod or VP9 tables, probably because they perform so much faster. When I turned on Exclusive Fullscreen in VPX the issue mostly went away, so I assumed it was more or less solved. Until I started playing IJ:TPA on physmod5, and noticed the performance drag there too. For PhysMod5, I can't use exclusive mode to work around the problem like I can on VPX. I guess I can try moving to Windows 10 to see what happens. I seem to be in a minority group using windows 8, and I haven't heard much negative about Windows 10.

Super slick web interface. A couple random thoughts: 1) Since this has been "databaseized", would it be possible to have an interface that keeps track of your tables, and looks for updates and applies them automatically? (Pinball Arcade style) 2) Along the same vein, I bet people would find it really useful if people who want to be on the bleeding edge could keep VP / VPM / DOF / B2S all updated with the latest-greatest. As I'm currently doing a lot of VPM development, VPM core changes have a domino impact on other components, and folks have trouble keeping up with everything needed to run the latest bleeding-edge tables.

I've been banging my head against the wall at this particular problem for over a month now and I just cannot figure it out. I am raising the white flag in hopes that someone has some idea that I haven't thought of. This is an i7 4790 4.0ghz processor with a Nvidia 960, on Windows 8.1. It should be able to handle this with ease. I'm experiencing slower - sometimes SIGNIFICANTLY slower VIsual Pinball performance when launched from PinballX. I thought it only affected VPX but I was wrong. I noticed some ball stutter when playing Indiana Jones PhysMod5, so I started to monitor its behavior. I typically run with Vsync On so its pretty obvious when performance dips. I turned off VSYNC to see the raw FPS throughput of my system and was pretty surrprised to see the result: Launching VP_PhysMod5 directly from Windows: ~350fps. Luanching VP_PhysMod5 from PinballX: ~70fps, jumpy ball. Launching through HyperPin: 600fps (!?!) - gameplay is super smooth, though. Things I have tried: 1) Setting CPU affinity to separate PinballX and VP/VPM/B2S. No change. 2) Different versions of PinballX - No real change. Newer versions seem to be a bit better than older ones. 3) Disabling B2S - No change 4) Adding RAM (4gb to 8gb) - No change. 5) Turning off EnableLUA (to really kill UAC) - No change. 6) If I go into the Task Manager while the table is running (at 70fps) and kill PinballX.exe, FPS will jump up to 350. 7) If I go into Task Manager and reduce the priority or change the priority of running processes - no change. 8) Disabling Intel SpeedStep 9) Disabling HyperThreading 10) Changing video driver versions to older ones 11) Checked refresh rates on all monitors - all 60hz. 12) Tried moving DMD to onboard video just for kicks- no change. 12a) Disable/Enable onboard video controller - no change 13) Played with the hide DMD / Hide backglass settings - no change 14) Using "Other system" and "Custom" type to disable Visual Pinball specific launching. No change. 15) Disable windows defender / exclude folders. 16) Verified that compatibility mode for XP is NOT set per post I found googling the issue (also tried turning it on.. no change). Under VPX, using Exclusive Fullscreen mode helps a lot - to a point where this problem is pretty much unnoticeable. Help?! pinballx_log_config.rar

I've been using PinballX for a while now and am quite happy with it. One thing that bugs me though, whenever I start a table, the desktop flickers through for a few seconds when I start and stop tables. I remember GameEx had a separate "HideOS" executable that it would run to prevent this from happening. Is there setting somewhere that I'm missing that will fix this? Thanks!

Hey Tom! Soooo... I upgraded the processor and video card in my pincab. I figured VPX had been out for a while now, and there were some new tables that were taking advantage of the new features, but why not go for max quality? All was going pretty well. Then when playing around with the Addams Family table, it suddenly decided it couldn't open the ROM. Checked the rom file. Not a zip. Huh? That file hasn't been touched in ages. So I reboot. I'm then greeted with an ominous warning on all 3 of my pincab's screens that my hard drive had been encrypted, and that to get my files back I'd have to give up some bitcoin. I burst out laughing. Somehow during the process of locating and downloading the latest video drivers, a cryptolocker virus came along for the ride! Not that big a deal, I have a semi-recent backup. Cool story bro, I know. Point being this was an opportunity to try out that automatic installer you mentioned over on VPU. This finally got me motivated to move to PinballX. Overall it went pretty smoothly. But since I just completed installing everything from scratch, some observations: 1) One of the most painful aspects was getting my 3 displays configured correctly. It would be great if there was a more interactive method of configuring them in the PBX setup wizard. The DMD positioning was especially difficult to get right. I think PBX is now writing the ScreenRes.txt file, but it isn't configuring VPM. I had to find SetDMD for that. 2) The VP install itself seemed to work fine, but only sets up VP 9.9.2. It looks like there's now a similar, "full blown" VP install over on VPForums that installs VP9.9, VP9 PhysMod, B2S, UltraDMD, and VPX. Perhaps you could use that installer? 3) PBX created a secondary "system" for VPX, but not PhysMod5. I had strange problems trying to get PhysMod5 to work, it didn't like the name I picked for some reason. It worked in Game Manager, it didn't show up in PBX's UI. Renaming the system name and folder to "VPinball PM5" took care of it. Anyway, going back to #2, if you auto-install VP, VPX, and VP9 PhysMod it would be great if PBX also created that category for you. I think it's going to be a while before PhysMod5 goes away. 4) The joystick button configuration in setup is a bit confusing. There's "Quit" "Exit Emulator" and "Pause/In Game". I'm guessing "Pause/In Game" is what most people would want for the exit button, as the first option on the menu that pops up is to exit the game, but that's not obvious. The (?) help hover-over doesn't really describe what these options do. 5) It would be nice if the auto-installer would include Direct Output Framework. Could leave B2S's plugin disabled, but leave the DOF files in the right place in the plugins folder. DOF is probably one of the most difficult things to set up that I've ever seen next to Oracle on Linux, so any head start you can give users is probably a good thing, and it seems to be a pretty standard part of this hobby. 6) I did have a backup, so I started with my HyperPin DB as a base. With HyperPin there is only one DB, so all my VPX, PhysMod and VP9 tables are in the same XML and identified only by a vpexetables text file. Having them in separate places in PinballX is wonderfully better, but it would be helpful if Game Manager had the option to MOVE a table (and its associated artwork) from one DB to another. I imagine people might want to do this as they upgrade their tables too. 7) The ability to pull down wheel images and such from Game Manager is amazing. 8) It would be nice if Game Manager had keyboard shortcuts and navigation (i.e. typing M goes to games that start with M). When working on my cab the mouse is really painful to use. That's about it! The point of all this is just to share my "fresh install" experience, not to nitpick or nag. You know me well enough to know I truly appreciate all the hard work you've put into this. Thanks for giving us this fantastic front end, and for sticking with this emulator front end thing for so damn long. Looking at my profile here I've been a member since 2005. 11 years ago? Good lord. Cheers. -- Rob

My VPCab came with a smart power supply that automatically cuts power to the TV when the PC's power supply goes off. The Toshiba TV had a setting to turn back on after a power failure. A PC monitor will typically go into standby mode when the computer shuts off, so it's less of a concern if you go that route.

I'm a little surprised to see that my new GTX 960 barely pulls off VPX at 60fps (vsync) with all the quality settings turned up. That said, it's absolutely worth having AA on. Some VP tables are super jaggy and ugly without it. AA was a no-go on my 650ti. So I'd get the best video card you can afford. I also upgraded my CPU from an i3 (3.6ghz) to an i7 (4.00ghz) but that doesn't seem to have made much difference. I think the video card is key.