TerryRed

While waiting for my parts to arrive from China for feedback (solenoids, lighting, etc), I figured I would get some other upgrades done to the cabinet, now that the plunger is working. After using the cabinet for a while, I really wanted to have a dedicated 4-way joystick for alot of the classic arcade games that really do need it. (Pac-man, Q-bert, Dig-Dug, and many more). I also wasn't really happy with the "ergonomic" button layout. Yah, it was nicer for fighting games, but not for anything else for me personally. Also, in order for me to fit a third joystick on the control panel I would have to rearrange the buttons in order to have enough space. I also didn't like the ball tops, and the LED joysticks don't allow for easily changing the tops without reaching inside the cabinet. Another thing I wanted was to eventually put in a spinner, but I needed to have a hole pre-drilled for it. So I have two extra buttons above the right joystick that can be swapped out with a spinner later on. I also put in a central "FIRE" button for those pinball games that use it (Star Trek, AC/DC, Alien Legacy, etc). I also labelled every button with transparent labels from a cheap label maker. It worked surprisingly well, and you can't see the label unless you look real close at the buttons. I decided to use a spare XBOX 360 gamepad (instead of the Logitech gamepad) for player one and the pinball controls. The main reason was that I wanted to have force-feedback outputs from the gamepad to use to create possible feedback options (solenoids, lighting) for Pinball FX2 and The Pinball Arcade in the future. I also setup this controller so that the x / y potentiometer was completely accessible for the plunger in the cabinet. This gamepad was MUCH easier to wire up as it had only one common ground for all buttons, and the pads were larger and easier to work with. Here you can see that I now have the entire control panel connected to two old school parallel db-25 cables for player one and player two, with a molex connector for the LED lighting. MUCH nicer than having all wires directly goto the gamepads. Yes, this involved soldering over 125 wires.... but now if I ever need to get access to the control panel or change / replace anything, I just unplug three easy to access cables. Yes, its alot of work, and I could have used some other solutions instead of gamepads, but that would not have given absolute complete compatibility with ALL PC Games and emulators / pinball games without some hassles. I will NEVER have any problems with any game running properly on this cabinet using this. Here you can see the extra trim I put around the side and front buttons. I found that the LED lighting was too bright at 12V for the LED buttons on the arcade panel, so I used 5V instead. Combined with the non-lit BAT tops, I found this to be much nicer on the eyes while playing. My white LEDS for the bottom white buttons have died out, and I didn't have any spares. So I put in similar colour LEDS as the A B X Y buttons to match for now. They look almost the same in person and much nicer as opposed to the picture. With the undercab and speaker lighting, it makes for quite the colorful display at night time.... can't wait for my addressable led strips!

As long as I don't get injured like he does, while doing my projects..... I'm good with that.

Well, now it is time for more upgrades.... as a result this is what happens in the middle of a project upgrade... total mess everywhere which makes my wife sooooo happy! I always wanted to add in a plunger and a big LAUNCH button. Can't easily find either in Canada, and buying from the US is costly with our crappy CDN dollar and costly shipping. So, I found a place in Ottawa that does repairs and sells parts called Pinball Medics. https://pinballmedics.ca/ Since I was taking my daughter to Ottawa Comi-Con, I was able to stop by his place and buy what I needed from him. He had everything except for the mounting plate for the plunger, which I didn't need anyway. He's a great guy and had a fantastic Pinball collection which I sadly didn't have time to check out.... Here's a video demonstration of my plunger setup: Hopefully I can maybe make a couple of custom tilt-bobs to work as a digital nudge type of setup. Then, I'm off to update the control panel with a different button layout, a third 4-way joystick, and all three joysticks will have BAT tops instead of BALL tops. After all this is done, its just a waiting game for all my parts to arrive from China, so I can install feedback via 10 solenoids. I'll also be installing led strip lighting to act as 5 rgb flashers, addressable led strip lighting / matrix for animation, white strobes, and red / blue beacons (LED strobe versions). Lots of work to do!

I had the same issue but only the first time I try to launch TPA after first loading Pinball X. If I exited TPA back to Pinball X, and tried again, it worked fine and selected the correct table. Not sure why...

OK....here you go. I have the 3 Aliens vs Pinball playfield video files and Table Audio on the FTP under: /-PinballX-/Other Uploads/TerryRed/Pinball FX2 No DMD videos as I can't really use my cabinet now because of my messed up back (I recorded on my desktop PC)....also my DMD videos would be "different" than everyone else's.

Try reading this topic: It talks all about the integrated TPA support. If you want to use the "integrated" support that Pinball X has for TPA that will "auto-rotate and select your game automatically", you need to set it up with the "Pinball Arcade" system (like Future Pinball, and Visual Pinball). If you set it up as Other System, then Pinball X will NOT auto-rotate your playfield. The "autorotate and game selection" via Pinball X "does" work, but it caused an issue for my specific setup (which is not like most people's...read the link". So I went with Ginsonic's method which works perfect for me. Read the whole topic for more info.

Well damn it all if I didn't have to do things the hard way. I just started playing around with CP Wizard to see if I could make a control panel / MAME logo pic for each game for the middle screens in my cabinet that would display while browsing and playing a game in MAME. Sure enough I got it figured out, and by doing a batch export....works great. Didn't realize this excellent little program also allowed you to use marquee art from MAME as well. Or other words I could have had this program create ALL my marquee / bezels with a background and name them to match the roms "automatically" instead of the much more involved process I had to do manually... which took days! I still would have had to sort out the different sizes for the marquees before hand (which I did.... I sorted ALL the orignial MAME marquees into different "sized" folders). Then I still would have to go through all the "blank" new marquee files (with no marquee art) that got created to find the actual files I wanted and delete any that are the wrong size... but then afterward I can just choose "skip existing" when making different sized marquees to skip the "blank" and "good" files. Then it's just a matter of sorting the "newer" date stamped files to see all of the new "marquees" I created sorted all together. At least I can just use a few "Layouts" now in CPWizard and simply change the background / bezel picture if I want to easily change my entire marquee collection to something new now. ....and I also just now saw CPWizBiz which creates marquees! Dang it all!

That seems to "mostly" be taken care of by Rom Lister if you choose "No Clones" (which I did). What you could also do is try just one category at a time, and progressively delete the game you don't care about.

As far as MAME XML databases for Pinball X go.... I used Rom Lister to make them, but the formatting of the text in the file needs to be changed to be the same as Pinball X. I so far just use one for horizontal games (almost 2000), and one for vertical games (over 800). These will get more and more refined for my own personal tastes and preference, but for now I just filtered out all the clones, non working, casino, mahjong, fruit machine, mature, etc and all the other non typical arcade games that I could really use or want.... at least for now. These databases are by no means perfect...and some games that play fine may not show up because of their "status". ie, Pac-man is "non working" and not in here, yet it plays fine in MAME, whereas Puck-man is in here. (You can manually add it in if you want) There will be others missing I'm sure, and some "Titles" may have weird characters, but so far this is working great for me. You may also use a different revision / version of MAME as well. If you use these lists, keep in mind that Pinball X will take MUCH longer to load initially (up to 1 or 2 mins possibly) because there are sooooo many games and files to sort out. Once its loaded up though, all works as per normal. You can use Rom Lister to make even more specific lists if you want... but here's my files to get you started for both vertical and horizontal games. I also included some that are specific categories, like driving, fighting, shooter, etc. but these are both horizontal and vertical combined. (I wouldn't recommend using ALL of these combined with the horizontal and vertical lists, as that would be over 5000 games!) MAME Climbing.xml MAME Driving.xml MAME Fighting and Wrestling.xml MAME Horizontal.xml MAME Maze.xml MAME Misc.xml MAME Multiplay.xml MAME Pinball.xml MAME Platform.xml MAME Puzzle.xml MAME Shooter.xml MAME Sports.xml MAME Vertical.xml

Sure, no problem. Will do now. I have over 4300 of them! It will take a while... ...all done.

I wasn't sure if this is something anyone would want, but I decided to upload my MAME media that I created for Pinball X on the GameEX FTP. I have a folder that contains all of my MAME marquee images that I made so far (over 2700). These were made to be shown on the backglass while browsing and playing MAME games on the playfield (horizontal and vertical games). The bezel around the marquee is a metallic hexagon pattern. I also have uploaded the videos I have done so far of actual MAME gameplay with sound. These videos are full screen 1920x1080p 60 fps, but are at the correct 4:3 aspect ratio. They either have a metallic hexagon pattern bezel, or the original arcade bezel (if it was visible enough & cropped to fit). They also have HLSL scanline scaling effects similar to the original look of a CRT (no rounding of the corners though). These include horizontal and vertical games that are played on the playfield screen. I will upload more videos to the FTP progressively, as I make them if that's OK Tom? (I only have around 100 right now) The files can be found in this folder: /-PinballX-/Other Uploads/TerryRed Here's a video to show what they look like on my cabinet: I could also upload my FP, VP, TPA, and Pinball FX2 video media if anyone's interested (and that's OK Tom?)

I read this April 11 and fell for it for a few seconds.... but then quickly checked the posting date! LOL! Nice one Tom!

By "default backglass", do you mean the cameramod default backglass image? If so, try making sure the mod doesn't have access to its own images for the backglass (assuming you don't want to use them at all). You could also try to trick the mod to use a backglass screen number that doesn't exist? I don't have access to my cab right now...but you could give those a go...

One thing I would like to see which may seem a bit weird.... When browsing games in Pinball X, I would like to have the option for the current selection's wheel art to disappear after a being idle for a specified time. So if I'm browsing through a bunch of games and stop on one, I wan't that big logo / wheel art to go away after a couple of seconds because I want to see what's showing on the playfield... The when I start scrolling through games it will reappear again. (I don't have additional details showing at all) This would be particularly nice for MAME and PC games that have their action focused toward the center of the screen, but would also be great for pinball tables as well. We have a backglass that shows the title of the game, so no worries about forgetting what game we are looking at...

Well here we go. I got MAME up and running in PinKadia! I have it setup to have Pinball X show the marquees on the backglass screen. (which I had to make into 16x9 pictures, over 2700 of them!) I captured videos of gameplay using OBS. I liked Tom's MAME videos from the GameEx FTP, but Pinball X makes them stretch and fill the whole screen with the wrong aspect ratio. I do use them for the games I haven't video captured yet. The vertical games are perfect for the playfield screen. Horizontal games could be played on the backglass screen, but they would be alot smaller compared to the playfield screen, and I would need to have my head looking upward all the time to play. My main priority was to have the game screen as large as possible with HLSL effects (no screen curve, or glow, etc). With the game this big (42 inch TV for the playfield screen) HLSL really is needed to make the game not look blocky and yuck! I also wanted no bezel obstruction of the game screen. I use Rocket Launcher to manage the bezels and backgrounds. This allows me to use a default bezel / background for ALL games, and I can have it easily change to a random / specific one or use MAME's artwork. Its easy to just add another background this way, and I don't need to deal with "lay" files! If the original arcade or a custom bezel works well to cover the leftover unused screen area, I'll use it. Otherwise I use a chrome / metal hexagon bezel that I made to match the style of my Pincab (it looks much better in person than it does in the videos!). I made several different ones to better fit the different sized marquees as well. I used Pinball X to have my backglass screen act as a DMD screen sized the same as the marquee, and centered. Then I had windows use the "blank" metal hexagon / chrome trim picture as a wallpaper background picture. When I ran Pinball X this way it displays the marquee OVERTOP of the metal hexagon picture. I used OBS to capture the entire backglass screen with the new 16x9 marquee as a small video. (I would hit flipper button, then "record" over and over and over again) Then I just played all the recorded videos back to back, and saved each as a picture with the name of the MAME rom file to match. It sounds complicated, but it was the easiest way to do this. I got over 2700 done! I know...,. I'm crazy. The reason I had to use OBS is because I couldn't find a program to "screen capture" the backglass screen (acting as the dmd screen) properly. They either require the "screen to be captured" to be the primary screen (which messes up Pinball X), or they will only capture the DMD portion of the DMD screen in Pinball X. I needed the entire screen with the marquee AND background....and OBS only does video capture. I have over 2700 MAME games setup though.... I'm not crazy enough to make custom backgrounds or bezels for that many games! Here is a video showing around 80 MAME games. It shows a mix of vertical and horizontal games with and without the arcade bezels.

Like what Carny said... I just defined my Visual Pinball system for VP X, then setup a separate system for VP9 and VP PM5 with the exact same settings in "other systems". The only difference was VP9 and VP PM5 pointed to a different exe. Nothing more to it than that. (I don't have Pinball X displaying B2S or PinMAME directly.... I just show videos while browsing. Nice and simple that way)

My personal experience is, that with most devices, they will get their ID / order assigned however windows orders them....but it does tend to be the same each time (if plugged into the same USB port, etc), but you can't make it in the order YOU want. You have to take it as it comes. As long as your console controller doesn't require any analogue function, you can have something like Pinnacle Game Profiler (maybe xpadder) assign your controls to keyboard equivalents for a specific program on the fly (it will do this on its own as long as your controllers have a unique "name"). This is how my Pincab handles my exit emulator / keys as well as killing specific running tasks (via BAT files) that is assigned to my exit button my gamepad controller. It automatically changes on a per-game basis. I downloaded all of Mr Dos artwork, etc, and I was considering doing something like what you have on a per game basis. The thing is, that if I put the marquee, etc all on the vertical screen then there's nothing left for me to display on my two other screens. lol. So for now, I'm using Rocket Launcher and it's excellent bezel features to use a generic bezel for EVERY game automatically with a generic (or random) background. This way I don't have to make ANY lay files to have a standard bezeled and background layout (for EVERY game), and I can still use MAMEs artwork (or my own easily via Rocket Launcher) on a per game basis as needed. Rocket Launcher bezels (made by the community) look excellent with its bezel / backgrounds on a horizontal screen. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be a community that does the same kind of artwork for vertical screens. I think I will end up having a Pinball X menu that will give me the choice to launch MAME either by the backglass screen or the playfield as well. (easy to do) Then I will have all the vertical games only launch on the playfield. As least I can do all of the above easy enough, its just a matter of getting something on each screen when playing that I like. At least with Pinball X, the "marquee" pics that I'm making will always be displayed on the backglass screen (or middle screen maybe when playing on the backglass screen). Making the marquee pics is tricky but goes fairly quickly....its just naming to match the rom file that takes so long since there are thousands of them! Its going quicker than one would think... just watching a lot of Netflix on the left of the screen while making the pics on the right of the screen... As for the head tracking with no leds.... that's actually what "facetrack-no ir" was made for...and it does work, but no where near as good as using ir leds or using kinex v2 for xb1. It is pretty cool that some of these pinball sims are working on the new VR headsets.... check this out:

Consoles emulators are a far off project for the pincab right now. On my 4K TV, (which my gaming PC is connected to) for the most part I have always just used an Xbox One gamepad for most of the older consoles (it covers most controls very well), except for the Wii which I have working perfectly with the original controllers (and in 4K too). AS for having to re-assaign controls.... are your controllers always connected? You could use a program like Pinnacle Gaming Profile (what I use) to automatically re-map controls when a specific emulator is launched. Even if I disconnect / reconnect controllers it works quite well. If controller IDs are the issue and you MUST unplug controllers to allow others to work correctly, you could try getting one of the USB HUBS with the on / off switch for each port. I made my own custom version for my simpit, so I wouldn't have to uplug my flight stick or steering wheel. I just turn on / off each at the throw of a switch on a panel which is in front of my flight stick. It will come....those vertical shooters look great on here. I'm in the middle of doing MAME marquees. I have to make custom marquees for my setup. I wanted the vertical screen to have as much of the game as possible with minimal bezel coverage. This means no mamelayplus for vertical games (even though it looks cool) because I hate how small the vertical games are using that. I'm also not going to create "Lay" files for EVERY game. I also don't like that the horizontal games are a lot smaller on the backglass screen compared to the playfield screen, even though you have a lot of unused space above and below it. Still not sure which screen I'll use... I had created over 1000 custom images that show both the MAME logo on the top part of the middle screen, and the game's marquee on the bottom half (or the other way around depending on marquee size). This would work for horizontal on either the top screen or the bottom screen. It looked great. I had to use a combination of creative use of Pinball X and OBS to do this....and yes it was ALL done manually! However I didn't like having to squish or stretch the various different sized marquees that MAME has....some of them are an entire 16x9 screen size! I didn't like how small they were compared to how big they could be. I also didn't know what to do with the top screen while playing vertical games. So I decided that I'm going to have the marquees on the top screen with a bezel-type image around it that will accommodate each size of every bezel. It looks really cool having these marquee images displayed in a large size while browsing and while playing! There aren't marquees for every game, so I will have to eventually figure out what to do with the other games. I will post pics / videos when I'm done.....there are A LOT of files!

A small update... I added led lights to the speaker bezel. I had to basically mount some thin cardboard inside around where the speaker holes are (had carbon fibre wrap on the cardboard). Then I stuck led lighting strips on the inside and connected them to the same molex connector for my rear fans. Then I put speaker fabric over the opening. Its not the best solution, but its easy, and it works with the small space I had. Each speaker light strip can have its light colour separately changed to any light colour via a remote just like under the cabinet. ...and now I'm on to getting MAME media started.... blah!

As far as OBS quality, you have to get the settings for your specific codec right to make it look good. I originally was using NVidia's encoder which required a much higher data rate, but then eventually was able to get a great quality recording using the standard x264 (not ffmpeg) with just the right settings. I used OBS MP (multi-platform), and was able to get better results than normal OBS. You can capture at a very high quality large file format and use a program like Rip-bot or Tom's excellent Convert-it tool to do a batch conversion of your files afterward to a smaller file size with similar quality. I originally captured all my videos at 60fps, but then used the above tools to convert them to a 30fps smaller file once I realised that Pinball X can only play "one" video at 60fps. When you have 2 or more videos playing at once, they will NOT play at a proper 60fps.... so having your videos at 30 fps is the better option. I did all my videos for Visual Pinball using OBS MP (manually) with the exact same settings as I did for Future Pinball (except at 30 fps), and it worked great. Using PBX Recorder would have made my job MUCH easier, but I wanted to record my videos at very specific times, so I had to do it manually. I'm too picky for my own good. Now I have to figure out exactly how I want to do my MAME setup... videos are easy..... custom middle screen with a MAME / marquee for each game.... that would take a long time... trying to figure out my options here.... and what time I have for it.

Thanks.... I guess it would help if I read the manual....like a typical guy I have to do things the hard way sometimes.... I got it sorted out. I had the right idea with making a copy of each VP system's xml file and keeping them in their respective database. I just renamed them VP9 ALL.xml, PM5 ALL.xml, and VPX ALL.xml.... but what I was missing was the lovely feature called the "Manage Groups" button in the "Games Manager". I just used that to import each of my xml files into one Visual Pinball ALL "Group". This prevents each xml file from showing up in a separate menu, and also combines their contents into one menu / wheel. Fantastic feature TOM!

The audio is a 5.1 logitech computer speaker set that I've had for years. The "front" speakers are beside the DMD, the centre and rear are inside the cabinet by the coin door pointing down to the floor. The subwoofer is in the middle of the cabinet pointing down as well, and its accessible from the coin door for volume. Yah, I got a bit crazy on those TVs for the simpit. (Got them on a boxing day sale) I no longer use the three tvs for it (one is in my pinball cabinet). Now I use my curved 4K TV for the simpit....and I await the day when I get a VR headset for it!

Well it was only a matter of time.... but I finally got Visual Pinball up and fully running on my cabinet and in Pinball X with videos, and art. I've got about 160 tables installed so far which includes VP X (10), VP 9, and Physics Mod 5 tables, as well as d2bs backglasses. This went surprisingly well using the all in one VPX installer that setup everything very nicely. Had to learn a few new things (I used VP many years ago), and needed a few more things added and updated for the newer Stern sam tables. I did have to update the VP PM5 version to the custom version that has separate registry settings (to allow for the nudge keys to be reversed). I had to use "setDMD" to position and size most of the DMDs automatically, and I also had to edit the settings for DMD rotation for roughly 40 tables in the registry. Then I just had to edit each table's script to allow for the d2bs files to be used. A perk of the split screen bezel for the third screen I didn't originally plan on, was being able to have the larger size DMDs display in the top portion instead of being squished in the bottom half. (Baywatch, Batman Forever, Frankenstein, Strikes N Spares, etc). I modified Draco's excellent Visual Pinball logo to make it fit a little better to have it act as a marquee for Visual Pinball. (Like I did with PFX2, and TPA) I "could" extend the d2bs backglass screen down on the third screen like I did with Future Pinball, but that would mean editing each d2bs file! Maybe if I can make some good custom "grill" settings to do that easier, I might... Here is a video showing off about 70 tables in Pinball X. I mixed up up tables from VPX, PM5, and VP9. I show how the different types of tables and different DMD sizes work with the split bezel on the third screen. I used OBS MP as I did before to record video of each table / backglass / and dmd / marquee. I could have used other videos, but most of them were of older versions of the table or d2bs file. As far as the whole VP physics are better than FP war that I keep reading.... I agree that "some" tables do play better on VP than FP, but I'm not blown away by it. I do love being able to play the original rom versions of the arcade pinball machines I grew up with. I know that I will be using VP alot more if I ever go the DOF / feedback / lighting route. Some of the VP tables are gorgeous (Circus Voltaire, Theatre of Magic, TOTAN, etc). This shows what is possible in VP when its done right. That said, I do still prefer playing most of the updated and modded FP versions (SLAMT1LTs, etc). Every time I hear the original sound of the arcade rom versions in VP it just doesn't even come close. I'm not a fanboy by any means.....if its fun "for me", then I'll play anything on any system. Good job on VPX.... man things have changed alot since I last played it back in 2008!

Thanks Tom....man this would have saved me alot of work getting some of the newer roms I needed. Good to know there is an easy way to catch 'em all without the hassle!

I have three different Visual Pinball systems setup in my cabinet via Pinball X. They are each labeled as VP9 tables, another is PM5 tables, and the last is VPX tables. Each system is setup and works great. What I want to do is have all three systems show up in one combined system wheel called something like "VP ALL". I made a duplicate of all 3 system's XML file (in their respective folder) and called it "VP ALL.xml". As a result I do get a combined new wheel menu that shows up called VP ALL that has the tables from all three systems.... so it does do what I want it to do. Only one problem... I get 3 menus showing up with the name VP ALL instead of just one menu. Am I doing this the right way or am I missing something?