Carny_Priest

As stated in the first post in this thread: The benefit is that the user no longer needs to rely on others to upload media, and that the resulting output best reflects the user's specific table configuration (e.g., layback settings, offset, graphic mods, DMD colorization, 2 screen or 3 screen B2S). With night mod, day mod, color mod, authentic and fantasy versions of the dB2S, colorized or standard color DMDs, plus any changes I happen to make, I don't know that I have what you are looking for. I only keep one version as the best representation of that table. Plus as soon as another version gets published whatever videos are out there are suddenly out of date. I don't have authority to delete items in the FTP so whatever I upload is there forever taking up space as far as I know. I'd rather just help you figure out how to run the script. What are you missing, VP or FP?

I typically run VP and FP with NVidia's DSR downsampling technology. Looks great in-game. When I capture video it is at resolutions as high as 4K which is a little hefty on file size and is a performance drag. The end result can be as high as 75Mb for a playfield video like Aliens Legacy. I'm finding that after a while the playfield screen will freeze on previews while the backglass and DMD videos, and wheel images continue to rotate through. If you are supersampling, you may want to downsample the preview videos by adding a filter to scale back down to 1920x1080 HD resolution: Or you could scale videos down to 1280x720 if you really want to manage file sizes. With the filter added that 75Mb video is < 10Mb. I'm hoping that will resolve my issues with the playfield preview videos freezing up. [edit] yep, downscaling appears to be solving my issue with previews freezing up

I haven't had a chance to check it out, but it sounds like good stuff. At least the file sizes are sane. Taking on the whole catalog is a big job. Much respect to you for picking it up.

Hi, I've completed re-processing my collection using Acrobat Pro and Illustrator. Everything is up on the FTP in my folder - Other Uploads\Carny The latest instruction cards suitable for PinballX is in folder Vector20150908. For the miniDMD\flash player project - rotated cards are in folder MiniDMDflash20150908 Again, these are factory cards, either from Stern and their associated table properties, Data East or Sega. Or, they are reproductions from Inkochnito. I definitely owe him a donation. I could not have completed this project without his resources. Each instruction card and price card is a matched set, so that when you run the flash player script, the pair get displayed together on the apron at the same time. I tend to keep a rom's nvram set to the factory default, so the choice of which price card to use is based on observation of the table's behavior or at least checking to see what card was used on the flyer. Inkochnito has plenty of free play cards if you prefer that. Sorry, everything here is localized to USA. That's where I live. If you have any special requests, let me know. Note: I don't yet have a price card for Bugs Bunny's Birthday Ball yet. I've installed it but I haven't played it yet, so I don't know how the pricing is set up. Guaranteed that it will just require a copy off of some other Bally table. They are pretty generic cards. The vast majority of cards are B&W text only, so it is essentially cropping the pdf in Acrobat and then copy and paste to Illustrator in order to retain the embedded fonts and keep output looking pristine in any resolution. I don't know that what I've produced is necessarily better than what is out there in media packs or in the media folder on the FTP. With the workflow it was faster for me to just do it rather than go out and look at every card available and determine if I could improve it or not. Sometimes, especially with the later Stern tables, the cards really do need extra work. The factory calls for printing on Astrobrights Solar Yellow card stock, so just outputting as it comes on the pdf would not be accurate. So, I had to do some coloring, tracing images, or finding and modifying own creating my own equivalent images. Sometimes I just have a photo image of a card, and I've tried to do some perspective corrections with my meager skills. I've included my work in a Source folder within the MiniDMDflash20150908 folder. There is also an updated tutorial. Have fun!

At some point, I may adapt my capture script and add the capability of capturing FX2, but at this point I don't have these newer tables. I usually wait for a sale. But here are a few more things to try: see if you can run FX2 in a false full-screen mode, or just for capturing, run FX2 in a window and capture just the window or crop the results in post If you have an NVidia card, try ShadowPlay. I've definitely captured FX2 in-game instruction screens with ShadowPlay before. Other software: Open Broadcaster Software (which I use in my capture script for FP playfields) Taksi apitrace

Or you can modify my script and do it yourself - http://www.gameex.info/forums/topic/15207-capture-videos-to-pinballx-media-table-backglass-and-dmd/page-3#entry139563 Or use FRAPS or Camtasia. But costs $. Taksi is a free capturer with a GUI that might work.

Time299 produces a very high quality media pack. It is complete up through the release of Portal. http://www.nukelauncher.com/item.asp?iid=408

Well, that issue has been fixed AFAIK. You can name these files the same as what is in the description tag.

Glad you got it working. I have a VirtuaPin Plunger Kit as well. It gets more complicated once you start adding more systems to the setup. Here is a bit of discussion about setting it up to work with PFX2 or TPA http://www.gameex.info/forums/topic/12837-resolved-support-for-pinball-fx2/page-13#entry134806 http://www.vpforums.org/index.php?showtopic=30205#entry293026

You might try swapping around the cable connections to the card. I have playfield on HDMI, BG on the DVI-I port, and DMD on the DVI-D port. I have the primary display as the BG on boot because that's where I want it. It's easier for me to maintain the machine looking at the backglass rather than the playfield. I use Display Changer II (dc2.exe), a feature rich version of rotate.exe, and set up different profiles to change the primary display to playfield when starting PBX and starting different systems within PBX. I use various display profiles for each system (Ex. 4K DSR downsampling for PBX, portrait mode for TPA, etc.). I have scripts set up for each system, but if you otherwise don't have many customizations, you can simply get into the Settings Wizard and set up PBX's built in launchers to change your display profile. Use the Shark007 codec package linked to on the PinballX front page. Updated packages directly from Shark007.net did not work for me.

It may not be the same issue in your case, but some people with joystick-based controllers have a conflict with PBX on exiting emulators if you set it up on both VP and PBX. If you have VP > Preferences > Keys - Exit Game mapped to a joystick button, you might clear it and allow PBX to exit VP for you. There are a lot of conflicts with Exiting with a joystick button on various systems. I wound up just clearing joystick control to exit emulators from PBX ini and setting up each system to exit on their own. For VP, I wound up using antimicro, an open source key mapper like xpadder, to map a button press to the 'e' key and setting up a script to close VP completely if detecting an 'e'. Otherwise, the normal VP behavior on exiting a game is to bring up the Resume, Go to editor dialog. Your situation is not exactly what I experienced but maybe give it a try.

No problem. I can't delete anything either. That's understandable though.

As usual, I took a lot of time working and generating media using one approach. Then when I get to the end of the project, I find a better way. This is about producing high quality instruction cards for front ends. I found some links to an old version of Adobe Creative Suite. This a bit of legal grey area here. It is Adobe that made these links available when they did away with their authentication servers for this product, but they did it to provide support to the existing base that still relies on the suite. On the one hand, this was meant to be for license holders. But on the other hand, there is no access restriction either. Anybody on the Internet can access these links straight from the manufacturer. It's old software, but what we need to do is not complicated. It will do the job. Here's a set of direct links. I downloaded Acrobat Pro and Illustrator. Also the WWE Extras file in case I found that I was missing some fonts on my system when working with source files in Illustrator. I might get lucky and find what I need among the extras. http://www.xyclopsoft.com/blog/2013/01/07/get-free-adobe-cs2/ I had my eye on a promising solution using Inkscape and some open source conversion tools that could possibly be automated or semi-automated, but the results coming from Adobe products is simply higher quality. Bad part is that it's definitely a manual process, and I don't have a lot of time right now. I'll post some updates as I find time on the FTP in Other Uploads\Carny\Vector. I'm publishing this tutorial mostly so that I don't forget how I did it, but if anyone else wants to pick this up and run with it then that's fine too. Order of the workflow is as written, just work through the sections. I'm using Windows. Don't know if the Mac version is any different:

Bonus - I found the archives at SternPinball.com. I grabbed several flyers. 1. xpdf - pdfimages is a command line tool that extracts bitmap images straight from the pdf 2. ImageMagick convert is a command line tool that will convert any image format to any other image format. Here, I converted the raw bitmap to png for lossless compression The result is a flyer image ready for use in PBX or as a resource. It is a 1:1 pixel perfect representation of what is in the document published straight from the manufacturer. Granted, the quality is still only as good as what the manufacturer chose to include when they created the pdf. Some of the ones for machines from ten years ago, well, it would probably be better to find somebody's scan of the hardcopy. The ones for more recent tables are print ready IMO. I've been copying up to the FTP 300dpi scans of flyers for a while. Ones that are freely available at flyers.cdyn.com. I've uploaded some of the Stern scans in that folder. Enjoy!

Intel i5 3570k @ 3.4 GHz 8 Gb DDR3 RAM NVidia GTX660 Samsung SSD 840 Series I'm running VP using NVidia DSR technology downsampling from 4K. All cores get close to maxing out. I tried some CPU affinity settings to try to manage the load manually, but I don't see that I am getting better performance. I do get stutter and timing issues with flippers depending on the sum of textures that need to be rendered on the table, so I know I'll have to dial something back. Either go back to HD or mirror on one side of the apron and not both sides.

Hi, I completed generating media for my apron miniDMD and flash player project. This primarily involved using GIMP to trim images out of source files and making sure they are scaled close to the correct manufacturer dimensions so that they will be displayed correctly by the player. Again, the player loops through lists of instruction cards and coin/score cards that are associated with a specific table and displays them on the apron on either side of the table. In the same way you can get PinballX to loop through sequences of cards by adding a number to the card's filename (Ex. Centaur.swf, Centaur 1.swf, Centaur 2.swf, etc.). You do the same thing here with series of images associated with a table. I arrange my cards so that every instruction card has some sort of coin card paired with it. For custom cards that are matched pairs, I make sure that their filenames end in the same number so that the player will display the set together at the same time. I've uploaded some of my work on the FTP Other Uploads/Carny/MiniDMD and flash player. These are images of the stock factory cards. In pairing coin cards to instruction cards, I checked for accuracy largely by observing the ROM when I begin a table. I always just use the default factory settings. For Stern Pinball tables I tried to confirm using shot maps or flyers if available. Otherwise, if I can't figure it out I simply look and see what the table author chose to use. Most files still require rotating for use in a cabinet. Use the batch converter script in the previous post. Some files are already rotated because they were rotated in the source that I captured them from. I'm only including the stock factory cards here. The source is primarily Inkochnito's reproduction cards and Stern Pinball who provided a lot of reproductions for the Sega and Data East properties that they acquired. I processed a lot of custom cards as well, but the sources tend to ask people not to re-distribute and I will respect that. Otherwise, the content is freely available. http://pinballcards.blogspot.com.au/ http://www.pinballcards.com/ http://www.pinballrebel.com/game/pins/instruction/index.htm People post custom cards at Pinside as well. For coin cards and my generic "Instructions" and "Table Info" cards, I've copied up the source files for the work

Hi, as part of the effort of generating media for my miniDMD and flash player project I went through my collection and recaptured many of the factory stock instruction cards. The sources are primarily Inkochnito's reproductions and Stern Pinball. Some I pulled from the VP table images. Some are photos that I did my best to correct. They are not perfect because I don't have the proper Adobe tools to vectorize and publish to flash, but they still are nice improvements to what I had collected from various HP media packs at VPF and elsewhere. Where we were missing a card I added ones to to the Media\Instruction Cards folder on the FTP. Where we already had a card, I did not want to overwrite what was there so I have put the rest in an Instruction Cards folder in my Other Uploads\Carny folder. If an admin wants to take a look and move them under the Media folder then that would be good. But otherwise, they are there in my folder. I'll add some more periodically as I add more tables to my cab.

Thanks, that works. Don't rename the other direction though (swf to png), That will crash PinballX. I'm generating my own media content though, some of it for publishing to the community. I don't want to risk distributing content that has the wrong type for the format that it actually is. I decided to just knuckle down and do the conversions the best way I can.

I do have a more recent script that I use but I haven't published because it is heavily customized for my setup. I also use a single xml but I don't use the alternateexe tag. I can post it if you want it. I don't worry too much about the old B2S staying up because I never really need to batch process tables for myself. And I have very few of those tables. I just close manually. If you do need to auto close B2S tables then you could just nab the close Rosve sub routine from FPLaunch

If you want to do a fake full screen windowed mode, you can always try to run the same bit of code that is used to hide titles and borders for PFX2 DMD. Can't think why that would not work.

Well, I see that you are getting help at the RL forums, so I'll leave it to them. I haven't worked with RocketLauncher yet. If nothing else, there might be a lot of superfluous activity that RL is doing behind the scenes that you may not want or need (auto-logging into Steam and looking for updates, etc.). If all you are looking for out of RL is support for TPA then you might just pull only what you need from the module script and create your own mini-launcher to work within PBX. It's just an AutoHotkey script. If you are looking for something easy, you might try NukeLauncher for TPA. It was built to work within PBX. It doesn't quite work for me, but I only have a handful of tables at the moment.

You will have to define near the top of the script under which system header you have VP10 defined from pinballx.ini Ex. system3 = System_4 ;PhysMod5 I have settings for PhysMod5 set up under the System_4 header Otherwise, the script is agnostic about the VP version. It will still work fine with VP10.

Is that a video or static backglass image?

For your setup does launching TPA involve a change in screen resolutions (e.g., landscape to portrait using rotate.exe or something)? If so, I can see this happening.

I converted the table guide for Portal. It is now on the FTP with the rest of the table guides.