Carny_Priest

https://www.gameex.info/forums/ftp/ If you become a supporting or lifetime member, you can obtain download access.

Sounds like you have it figured, though. Everything else is just fine tuning. Guess I'll put Wicked on my wishlist for the winter sale. Nice work!

SlamIt: BigScore - does not have full screen, windowed mode. The ahk script is used to make the window borderless and then maximize. It's fake full screen, windowed. Because the game is landscape, the DMD image must be rotated on playback on a third screen. Freezy's dmdext does not support rotation. And I'm not so sure how effective it is at capturing what is in reality 1:4 aspect ratio and not 4:1. For me playback quality wasn't very good at all with SlamIt where it worked quite well for other apps. But since you are two screen, I think you can get by without rotation. You would rotate the backglass image so that it is oriented landscape similar to the playfield. If dmdext capture works for you then at least you would not have to rotate. Latency with this method was better with Win 7, when I first developed this solution, than with Win 10. All said, my cab has been down for nearly two years now with some sporadic up time. I haven't tested anything in a long time. YMMV

Yes, that's well known: https://vpinball.com/forums/topic/lesser-known-features-of-vpinmame-dmd/ As long as you are comfortable with regedit then you can achieve results that are pixel perfect. It is easier for novices to the use the mouse for rough resizing then get into the registry and fine tune if you are willing to go the extra mile.

B2S score rendering is just for tables with alphanumeric displays (older tables from 70s to 80s). B2S does not support rendering DMD (dot matrix displays from tables produced in the 90s or later like Monster Bash). For tables with DMD scoring move the DMD display that is rendered by VPinMAME to your backglass and resize it with your mouse as you would any other window. Don't hide it.

Yeah, I forgot that you were rotating the screen. PinballX won't work in that scenario. Using AutoHotkey, it has an integrated image viewer. As you know, IrFanView is another solution. SlamIt: Big Score - the script is specifically for 3 screen. The game is normally single screen, landscape, with options on camera and where a DMD can be placed. Ffmpeg is used to capture and livestream just the DMD image. Ffplay rotates and scales the DMD for live playback. The ffplay window can be placed on the backglass display. The deal is that it is a Window with borders and title and navigation buttons, etc. And it is resistant to instructions to remove the title and borders. I wound up just using AutoHotkey to draw a mask over those borders so that it would not appear on a third screen. You'd have to get creative. Take the backglass image and add a display panel with a transparent space for the DMD image. And then make sure that the backglass image is drawn over the DMD ffplay window. May take a lot of tweaking to get the locations/positions of images just right. I like the table myself, so although I only spent a buck or two on it I found that it was worth the time and effort to get it looking good on a cab.

You would just create a static backglass image. Hopefully you can find some resources for the game online somewhere, or else you will have to get creative with Photoshop or the GIMP. It goes to your the apprpriate PinballX\Media\<Wicked or whatever you are calling the system in your ini>\Backglass Images folder. Set the hidebackglass tag to False in your xml. Given that the software only uses your playfield screen this should work. I'm interested to see how this works out. Another game for you to try out is SlamIt: Big Score Pinball. With Steam Winter Sale, it's only 99 cents but I think it's a pretty entertaining table. Not a big loss if you don't wind up liking it. I've gotten it fully working on three screens using ffmpeg to mirror and livestream the image on my third display.

https://store.steampowered.com/search/?term=pinball fx3

PBXRecorder and I believe the recording features in PinballX (I have not tested) capture video in a 2-step process. The initial capture dumps raw frames into a container. It takes this approach because compressing video is a CPU intensive process in itself, so intensive that it may cause slowdown/dropped frames in the game that you are trying to capture which you don't want. The second step happens after the capture. The video is processed to precisely cut the length to the right time (30 seconds, 60 seconds, or whatever) and to compress frames so that file size is manageable. OBS Studio and many freeware video editing suites are based on ffmpeg. In ffmepg, the crf or qp flags are compression quality level parameters in the H.264 codec (the one that is commonly used for mp4 format) that can be used to find the desired level of quality versus size in the output file. The higher the number used in the flag the higher the compression but the less quality. Even picking a value close to the middle will produce output with substantial savings in file size with an imperceptible impact on quality. PBXRecorder has a default crf value of 26, as I recall, which favors a little bit more on smaller size versus quality. This gets the target length for a full HD video, 60 seconds, to about 15 to 20 Mb. Yes, 4K would be larger but not even close to 200 Mb for 30 seconds. Hey, but it's not my server and it's not my bandwidth. If people have the hardware and hard drive space to handle this, then more power to them. Don't get me wrong. I'm usually the HQ at all costs guy. I look for 2000 px wide wheel images and 300 dpi flyer scans for my media. I've redrawn hundreds of instruction cards to ensure all the sources are vector-based or highest quality raster and all fonts are accurate. And I'm muttering to myself, "Jeez! Tone it down, friend.".

Dayum! There's probably something you can do to get the frickin file sizes down. Adjust your crf or qp flags. 13Gb is probably larger than the entire game with all DLC. Sober up. After all, these are just attract videos, so lossless Dolby Atmos is way overkill.

That's still doing it the hard way. If you are using ffmpeg then I think that you can use the gdigrab parameter and simply capture the contents of your desktop limited to the backglass screen while in-game. This is an AutoHotkey script I coded for the old Pinball FX2 for capturing the DMD only. It can be modified for capturing the entire backglass. A transcode step is commented out in the code that would make the file length smaller and save the output right into your media folder. Uncomment and it will work and it will be fully automated. In this particular case as I was publishing the output on the FTP, I manually edited with Avidemux so that the DMD attract mode loop was seamless with the end going exactly back to the beginning. The length of the attract loop varies by table, and I don't know how long each one is ahead of time. I don't have FX3 installed but I expect that the script would largely work once you replace the Steam launch ID with the one for FX3.

Yeah, the hidedmd tag in the database xml only tells PinballX what to display while in-game. False - display the attract mode DMD image from your media folder; True - display blank; no image. A common setup configuration for 2 screens would not make use of DMD videos or images at all. Those are reserved for systems with three monitors/TVs. If you can't find a source for a media image or video that matches the look of your backglass in-game then you would record one yourself. I don't know for sure that PinballX's integrated video capture works with PinballFX3. If not then you may be able to use your video card's screen capture app. For Nvidia, that's ShadowPlay. AMD would have a similar feature, but I don't know the name. Just capture the entire backglass in-game and use the output in your Backglass Videos folder. Of course, since your capturing the entire backglass you would also be capturing the embedded DMD.

Display Changer II is a free (for personal use) CLI app for controlling resolution/placement/rotation of Windows displays. Free > temporary trial and it is easy to use in a bat or AutoHotkey script. https://12noon.com/?page_id=641

I have not updated. Not sure how well it works with the latest Zaccaria.

I don't see this as a PinballX thing at all as your issue is performance within the emulator and not the front-end. Hiding the DMD in the xml is the correct course of action but this only controls whether the DMD image or video stored in the media folder continues to be displayed in-game or not once you launch. This does not control anything in the emulation. In-game, press F1 on a connected keyboard and make sure Visual PinMAME settings for the table actually does have Show DMD/Display window unchecked. I've found it easier to simply use the Settings UI rather than edit the table script. Advanced users may just edit the registry directly (regedit). Then refer to the instructions for the B2S Player. There are settings with that program that will use B2S generated segments for the scoring display and you can disable Visual PinMAME rendered scoring. Note that some directb2s files may actually display something in the third screen (a static image usually but the author could possibly animate it based on table events in a fantasy scenario) even if the table would normally make use of two screens. It's good to explore all the possibilities.

I don't think that there is a hotseat command line launch parameter for FX2. That was a feature that came after the initial release of FX3. Doubtful that Zen will port it back to FX2 given that they don't sell FX2 anymore, I don't think. I expect NukeLauncher might work fine if the system type is set to Custom instead of using PinballX's integrated support. The solution does require more housekeeping to ensure that it is working correctly as the selection process is based on a table's position on the main menu grid. The positions change as new tables are added.

PBX Recorder is for Visual Pinball. I have done ports for Future Pinball and Zaccaria. It would be possible to adapt the source code to work with PBA. It won't be me doing it, though. I don't have PBA any longer.

Haven't looked too closely at the script, but this seems like way too much housekeeping and setup. Add one table, have to update eight database files. And I guess you have eight different wheels and videos, etc? I'd just set up a GUI in the AutoHotkey script that is displayed as a dialog upon script launch. Choose the number of players (make the dialog box navigable with cab buttons). Select classic mode or not. Code selections within a Run instruction. Can be done conditionally but would be even more streamlined to store the selections in variables. This way you only need one xml database (no need for sub-groups) and one set of media. Look up GUI examples and Variables in the AutoHotkey wiki or alternately you can pick just about all the needed code from the PBXRecorder source which heavily makes use of interactive dialogs. I'm just happy that hotseat is supported in the command line now. That's great! I have an AutoHotkey launcher script that I would update for this except that my cab has been out of order for months. I don't even have FX3 installed yet. Delays and timing issues are managed by Sleep instructions. Different machines sometimes require different delays. Add a Sleep instruction or if one exists then perhaps add more time.

Display Changer II is a CLI app that can configure you're displays such that the main playfield display can be disabled and the backglass display can be defined as your primary display. You can build a bat file or AutoHotkey script around Display Changer II so that PinballX can launch it prior to MAME and then when MAME closes down you can launch another script to return your desktop configuration to a state where you can play pinball. You would likely have to set up different MAME systems within PinballX for verticals and horizontals. This is what I call advanced work. It's doable because PinballX is flexible but there's no built-in/native support for this in PinballX.

Thanks. I'm not a Mega Docklet's guy but I'm definitely interested in the bottom logos/table name images. I tend to use those exclusively for wheel images instead of templates or heavy character based images. I like to keep it rather simple. Also, I've drawn hundreds of instruction cards and uploaded to my folder on the FTP. I've always uploaded my source files as well (Illustrator mostly). I don't think space is much of an issue in case you did want to provide PSD source files.

text logos with transparency. 32assassin has several on VPForums. And he might have updates in his collection at hyperspin forums. https://hyperspin-fe.com/profile/2831-32assassin/content/?type=downloads_file For what was missing, I created some by pulling from flyers and backglass images and copied them to the FTP. Media/Zaccaria Pinball/Wheel Images Quality of source images for some of these was poor around the time the app was first released so the result was not great either. This work is free to use by the community without attribution. All sources are trademarks / copyrights of their respective owners. This is to be privately used in front-ends or for other non-commercial (or at least non-profit) pinball-related applications. I hold no responsibility for their misuse.

Classic hyperpin is the one that supports a host of single function buttons as I recall, but most cab users want their cabs to look like a real cabinet! It's always possible to override PinballX and display flyers/instruction cards, whatever with custom scripting (AutoHotkey would do this and it has image viewer functions). I don't think it would be hard, but you'd be on your own to do it. Could be a plug-in?

Yes to static zeranoe build. x64 if you have a 64bit OS. I've never had any issues just grabbing the latest overnight build and running with it. Portable (zip) build. Extract to your c: drive. Make sure paths are defined correctly in bat files or ahk files that need ffmpeg. Or simply add to Windows Environment PATH variable.

I would if I could, but my cab has not been working for many months. Just chiming in here because I do know something about the external recording apps.