mace

Long post alert.... I've been hanging around the group commenting now and again since I started building my cab about six months ago. It's now mechanically complete and running three versions of VP, Future Pinball, Mame, FX2 and PBA. I've put in all the lights and hardware for force feedback and so on through a Ledwiz setup but I've not implemented this yet as I wanted the video running as smoothly as possible. I'm a bit of a perfectionist so I've tried just about every combo of Nvdia settings, Video settings per program and compatibility settings per program too no matter how much I changed this around (and we are talking about three months of tinkering) I could not get the ball flow in VP and FP as smooth as I really wanted......until this weekend. I'm running a three screen cab set up with a i3-4150 at stock, the DMD and backglass displays are handled by the Intel chip in my mobo and the main card a GTX560GT is handling the main screen, there 4Gb of very fast RAM and SSD's to hold the data. I have everything switched off in Windows 7 x64 so it only has to worry about pinball. Most of the wisdom on the site talks about disabling compatibility mode and there are several guide which indicate that this should be done in the individual program settings, I've found that on my set up this causes micro stuttering. If you are suffering with the issue try the following: - Back up your current settings first (always do this), the easy way is simply to use the snipping tool to grab snapshots of the various pages below - Set your Nvidea settings to stock, then change max pre-rendered frames to '1', ensure that triple buffering is 'on' and leave vsync to 'use program settings' - Enable Vsync in all VP and FP programs, in VP programs where available put '1' in the vsync and max pre rendered frames boxes . Then make sure that these programs compatibility settings do not have 'disable desktop composition' checked (you just need 'run as admin' and the correct 'run this program in compatabilty mode for....' selected) by right clicking their exe files. - Right click 'My PC', click 'Advanced System Settings', click the 'settings' button under the Performance section uncheck everything other than 'Enable Desktop Composition Mode' and 'Use Visual Styles on Windows and Buttons', apply changes close the window then open it again and uncheck any settings that have rechecked themselves (there are usually two) to ensure that only the two settings above are all that is checked. - (Optional) open the Service program by typing 'services.msc' in the run box under the Start menu and stop the 'Themes' and 'Desktop' entries then change their start properties to 'manual' - Reboot and give things a try On my set up this has resulted in nice smooth gameplay in FP, VP 921,991 & P5, PBA, FX2 and Mame (although the last three were never an issue). I'd like to stress that this is my set up only however I have built test tables in the programs, run frame rate lag analysis with help from the tech team at Microsoft where I work (note here: frame rates shown in the programs are not a measure of smooth video performance). Please note that this may mess up the older versions of VP - particularly VP8 in which case you will need to tick the 'disable desktop composition' settings in those programs compatibility settings. This is the first post where I've tried to give advice and I hope that it helps someone, I've had tons of assistance from the folk here so I hope this may pay a little of that guidance back.

I posted on this one separately here: http://www.gameex.info/forums/topic/14632-multiple-exe-for-vp/ and ended up using Horsey Horsey script which looks for a <exe>/</exe> switch in the database instead - it's a better solution for now as the tables using an alternate program now close in three seconds. Ideally I would rather go with Tom's native support to cut down on the additional scripting so once the timing is sorted I'll simply use the notepad 'replace all' command to change the tags back to <alternateExe>/</alternateExe> and then switch off the script in the run before option.

Hmm, looking at your video I noticed that you have an extra screen advertising The Addams Family, that was posted up back last Halloween so I'm guessing that the script that sends the key commands is missing one key press as that screen will need an {enter} to clear, in other words that screen is knocking out the key sequence. You may be able to see this better if you start NukePA from an elevate Dos prompt with the command: NukePA.exe "Table name" Jeff may be able to comment if it's possible to add a small .ahk script like: sleep 14000 send {enter} If this was compiled to enter.exe and placed in the [Launch] section of NukePA.ini like this [Launch] LaunchBefore = enter.exe LaunchAfter And the other NukePA.ini timings were left as default it may give you the extra enter you need one second prior to the normal NukePA.exe script taking over. ....or we ask Jeff if it's possible to do this a little more elegantly (I'm no expert in these things)

It would also be good to understand the <alternateexe> switch too, if it uses the same parameters as the main program and why the programs evoked by the switch appear to pause for an additional 15-20 seconds on table exit.

Yep it's a function of the PinballX code, tried everything else today from building an .exe to slam all the Vpinball.exe's and B2SServer shut when the tables close to modding the scripts to add No Launch and the exit lines in the B2SServer document - all no go. Ran it through a debugger cycle in the end. I will be patient until Tom may be able to get to this, the world will not end over a 20 second wait :-)

Thanks, I applaud all the others in the scene with more knowledge who have done so much for the rest of us....... .....sadly She Who Must Be Obeyed does not share that opinion....

--------------- Cods..... Thought I had fixed this but no it's persistent and it's returned after I did a bit of editing to my Vpinball.xml tonight. I've tried this on two setups now with the same result. I know that the feature is for advanced users and is under development so just throwing this out there to see if anyone has any thoughts or it helps development. As mentioned above using the manual addition of the <AlternateExe>insert different Vpinball.exe here</AlternateExe> line in my table .xml file I can happily get PinballX to launch all my Vpinball tables with exactly the right version of Vpinball. The beauty of this is I only need to maintain one set of media folders for all the Vpinball media. The fly in the ointment is all my tables open and close in 8 seconds, unless the AlternateExe tag is used in which case the tables using the non default Vpinball.exe program takes an additional 20 seconds to close. During this time the DMD locks up at the point of exit and the back glass holds on too. After the twenty second delay everything drops back to the normal point of table exit for the last 8 seconds which behaves normally. In short it looks like it mat be a lock up and time out. I'm running a three screen cab, Win7 x64, i3-4150, 4gb Ram, GTX560 1Gb, SSD, Vpin Plunger and Kinect for head tracking in FP. Everything is running as administrator and the main programs are also set in the applicable XP or NT mode. Nothing is installed in the program files folder, no dll's are blocked and all my tables and b2s back glasses are named the same too. Finally I've been through my ini's with a fine toothcomb. I kill explorer and direct draw when PinballX runs and kick them into life again when I close the program. All I can think of is my tables all have b2s animated backglasses and tomorrow I'll try again with those disabled.

Right, solved this in the end. It's to much hassel to reprogram all the pinball elements of my cabinet to have the screen vertical for when I want to use it for adding tables and so on so I decided that a rotate shortcut was the way to go. Unfortunately the Nvidea drivers do not seem to support the arrow key shortcuts that exists in Catalyt Control Cente for AMD Radeon cards but I've found a simple solution for Nvidea cards using the little Display.exe program here: http://noeld.com/programs.asp#Display Once installed it's easy to set up a little batch file in the same folder with a shortcut on the desktop to flip the screen with a single click at will, here's the commands ( if you run display /? From a command prompt these are listed): Download Display. Extract the Display.exe to a location of your choice (e.g., C:\Display.exe). Create a .txt file and place one of these line in in, they are pretty self explanatory, and save the file the rename it to something like 'rotate.txt' , then change the extension to .bat so you have a rotate.bat file containing your choice of one the following lines: C:\Display.exe /rotate:0 C:\Display.exe /rotate:90 C:\Display.exe /rotate:180 C:\Display.exe /rotate:270 C:\Display.exe /rotate: display /device 2 /rotate (rotates screen 2 rather than the default screen 1) C:\Display.exe /rotate:90 /toggle (my choice as each time it runs it toggles between the default rotation and rotated one) Use the [right-click] -> New -> Shortcut dialogue to create shortcuts for the batch file and drag it to your desktop. Now you can choose how to use the shortcut, I'm now running it in the close program section of PinballX to flip my table vertically as PinballX closes.

Interesting, I'm running Win7 x64, I fixed the issue eventually by using a killbackglass.exe as outlined in the installation section. However the tskill batch command would not work consistently, turns out this is a known issue on Win7/8/Server and you need to apply for hotfix KB2798040 to fix it. Hope this helps someone.

Great update thanks Tom, Installed 1.97 tonight with no issues, decided to do the donkey work of adding the .xml tags to separate out the correct .exe version for the tables and noticed something a bit odd, when I exit a VP table with an alternate .exe selected it takes about twenty seconds rather and the couple of seconds it used to take. The table playfield display goes to black but the dmd display carries on as does the backglass. Previously I was using horseyhorsey's xpath solution for tagging the alternate .exe's so there's been no other changes? - any ideas (i.e. what basic error have I made this time) VP's parameter path in set up is the bog standard one.

Well if you call adjusting the flipper strength, bounce, angle, plunger response, tweaking the slope and friction physics Smoke and mirrors -

BAM is awesome especially now I have PinballX calling Future DMD first so all three displays are in use but I do find Future pinball very frustrating, every table needs a range of tweaks and them they play beautifully - and I have a Kinect running in the cab too. My only grouse at the moment is wishing I had enough knowledge to get into Future Pinballs code to set things up for my Virtua Pinball accelerometer so nudging is a little more sensitive as even on +2 it does not hold a candle to the newer Virtual Pinball builds.

Thanks all, fixed now thanks to the ini and the fact I already run a script to kill windows explorer when PinballX starts and restart so a quick hack and slash and it was done. Frodus, not sure of the odd on this but the last table we both played was the same :-)

Thanks CP - appriciated

Hi Zeenon, nope I'm saying when I rotate my windows desktop to portrait AND rotate the PinballX menu to display correctly in this setting everything is fine apart from the table images in the PinballX menu which as I described are half width. Thanks frodus, yep I've been at this all day it certainly looks to be a bug, Do you recall which line you changed in the config fil?e

Thanks for working on this its a really simple and elegant solution to having multiple file locations, I have one quick question.... I've followed #4 and it's all working fine but I'm not clear on the xpath file that goes into the Virtual Pinball main directory, should it be left as a zip, unzipped as xpath.ahk or compiled into xpath.exe - I've done all three but the answer is nagging at me and I'm no script expert.

Actually I wouldn't mind an answer on this one as my cab is sandwiched between two other pinball tables and having the pc display in landscape is a royal pain, but as devorin points out if I rotate my desktop to face the lock down bar and change the Pinballx settings from 270 to horizontal everything works other than the table images and I cant for the life of me see when the are sized to match my 1080p screen why they show as thin. It's not the driver as the table manufacturer still shows happily in the corner as does the menu - just the playfield images. I'm sure I'm probably doing something basic in error so if anyone would like to help by showing me to be daft please fire away...