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bduncan

GameEx Lifetime Member
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Everything posted by bduncan

  1. I had to do something similar in the past with Pinball Arcade I believe. So today I just setup a simple AHK script to close pinballx.exe, and I set that to launch before Pinball FX3. When I launch the PBFX3 table, pinballX is terminated immediately then PBFX3 launches and the logo displays for PBFX3, and the the table starts., Now I see the PBFX3 logo and everything works. I then switched the start before script from the above, back to my script that deletes any lingering FX3 save files. (disabling my terminate pinballx script) It started working properly then after that.. When I launch a FX3 table from Pinball X the playfield now display PBFX3 launching, no black playfield screen for 8 seconds. I tried rebooting my computer and it is still working properly now. Makes 0 sense to me. Thanks for all the help.
  2. Correct, when I launch the Pinball Fx3 table, the playfield goes black (where it normally would list loading image) I hear the PBFX3 background music table loading sounds, then the DMD and backsplash comes up (playfield still black at this point) and the intro starts for whatever PBFX3 table it is, in this case Jaws the guy is doing his intro, and then 5 seconds later the play field comes on. Windows 8.1 did not do this, I don't remember now how Windows 8.1 worked, but I did not have this happening. I assumed this had to do with the waitfor variable, because if I increase it past 11 I think it stays black longer. That's why I figured it was a matter of just being able to set the waitfor variable lower than 11. The gui config tool shows 11 as being the lowest value on PBFX3 for the waitfor.
  3. Thanks! I first upgraded to 3.57. Then removed the loading screen. Confirmed it is still happening, renamed the pinballx.exe to .old.exe then copied over your test exe. Still doing the same thing. I compared times with both exe's and they are the same. When I launch Jaws PBFX3, the moment the game starts and the guy starts doing the voice intro the playfield screen is black for 8 seconds before it finally displays the playfield screen. (But backsplash and DMD from the game are displaying fine during these 8 seconds) It seems to be the same time between both the default 3.57 and your test exe. I also tried changing the waitfor directive under PBFX3 from the default of 11 I had to 5 and -1 and neither seemed to make any difference.
  4. It is just a script that DEL /F/Q/S the savegames for PBFX3. When you exit PBFX3 without doing so gracefully it leaves behind a save game that the next time you launch it will ask if you want to resume. So my batch file deletes those save games then has an exit directive. Let me disable that, I don't recall now if I already ruled that out.. I probably did. Yes, it seems to make no difference at all. The Pinball FX 3 tables fully load and are available for 7 seconds while the play field screen stays black. During that 7 seconds the playfield is black you can hear the intro in PBFX3 for whatever table is loaded and you can see the DMD going on my DMD screen and whatever background table screen there is on my 3rd screen. So when you choose a Pinball FX3 table from within pinball X, how many seconds is it after that, that the table is up the intro is playing for the Table you chose? For example Jaws, when he starts talking with his intro, it is around 5 seconds when I choose jaws in Pinball X, till he is saying the intro for the table. That is why I thought that 11 is the minimum on the WaitFor= directive since 5 + 7 is around 11 seconds. If I increase the wait for directive to more than 11 it increases the time that the main playfield is black while the table is loaded. Before I get to see the play field.
  5. Just checking to see if you had a chance to check on this, is it possible to make it so you can set a delay lower than 11 on that waitfor= directive? Thanks
  6. Any update on this Tom? Is this something you can account for in PinballX moving forward at some point? One of the things I did determine is that WaitFor= directive under PinballFX3 does seem to be ignored for any value below 11. I can set it from -1 to 11 and have the same results. (manually with a text editor) The results look the same also for anything above 11, but what I noticed if you increase above 11, it takes even longer after PBFX3 is loaded until it will catch the ESC and exit back to PinballX. Up until then when you hit ESC PBFX3 catches it and pauses the game. Based on how quickly my PBFX3 loads, I am guessing if I could set that directive and have it use it, to like 4 or 5 seconds I would be good. Thanks
  7. Yes, 3 screens, cabinet mode. Thanks!
  8. No, no loading screens at all. in \media\loading images I just have loading.png.old so it is disabled..
  9. Hello, Was previously running Windows 8.1 and the most current version of PinballX in my cabinet. Use primarily PBFX2 and PBFX3 at the moment. PBFX2 loaded and exited without issue very quickly. PBFX3 would take a long time to load. (compared to PBFX2) You would select a PBFX3 table and launch it, and the screens would blink and eventually when the main display would regain focus I would see the PBFX3 loading screen for whatever table I had chosen and then shortly after the table would come up and I would play. PBFX3 was obviously the hold up but it all worked pretty seamlessly. Today I updated this machine to Windows 10, I am back to PBFX2 working without issue very quickly. One thing I have noticed is that PBFX3 loads way quicker now under Win10, so the issue I am having is that when I launch a PBFX3 table from PinballX, the screens flicker a few times and within 5 seconds the PBFX3 specific backglass is up, and by 7 seconds the PBFX3 table is already up and loaded, but my main playscreen stays black for another 7 or so seconds before it finally pops up (while the DMD is running and the backglass is up) with the display halfway into the intro of the selected PBFX3 tables. Does not look very nice now. I am really happy that my load times for PBFX3 tables have increased so much when moving to Windows 10, but why is PinballX so slow to the draw with PBFX 3? I looked in my log.txt and it seems to take PinballX a pretty long time to see that PBFX is running when I know for a fact that after launch I see the DMD/backglass for the game load after like 5 seconds, so is running by then. I see it take anywhere from 16 seconds to 30. I have played around with the Wait for settings for PBFX3 in the GUI settings, the minimum I can select in the GUI is 11 seconds, I have also tried setting below that in the .ini manually and that does not make any difference. I am wondering if PinballX ignores anything less then 11, and defaults to 11. I need to be able to go lower if that is the case, because my system is really fast now on Win10. I think PBFX3 tables might be loading as quick or quicker than PBFX2, which I never had before under Windows 8.1 Anyone know how I can fix this? I have attached my files. Thanks! [SETTINGS].log log.txt PinballX.ini
  10. Really love your work, great job!! Was looking on the FTP site side of things because I was hoping to find all of your work in one place. I think I found all of your contributions on the web side of this though. It looks like Attack from mars, Jurassic World, Back to the Future, ET, Jaws, and Kiss. Is that right? Did you share a champion pub or medieval madness yet by any chance? Or are those still works in progress? I thought I saw an example/sample of your remake of that for an animated backglass somewhere else, maybe on Zens website?
  11. Looking forward to this, would be grateful for a guide. So I take it if we use TPA Arcooda Cabinet mode, any tables launched using this method still uses FreeCamMod, we just don't need cam files for each table that Arcooda Cabinet mode supports?
  12. Just finished configuring and testing PBFX3 with PinballX with my cabinet. Pretty nice, but one thing I noticed is when my kids exit a table in PBFX3 before completing a game the next time you start that table from PinballX PBFX3 asks you if you want to Continue last game, and gives a prompt for Continue or Start new game, but the flippers do not actually toggle through the available choices. (Odd for cabinet mode enabled that they would not make that based on flipper key vs arrow keys on keyboard) Anyone know if there is the ability to turn off that "feature" of it saving that you were in the middle of a game that ended early?
  13. If you had a shortcut for pinballarcade11.exe created, you could right click on the properties for the shortcut, and in the target field you would change it from: Target: c:\games\pba\pinballarcade11.exe to: Target: c:\games\pba\pinballarcade11.exe skipwhatsnew I thought that worked at one point. I don't know, maybe once you run it once that way it always skips whatsnew moving forward?? I know that on my cab I don't ever get whatsnew, and I had an old shortcut with the skipwhatsnew in it, but don't launch it that way from pinballx, I only use that shortcut when testing outside of pinballx.
  14. I believe it was skipwhatsnew passed to the application like - pinballarcade11.exe skipwhatsnew
  15. TPAFreeCamMod won't work with DX9, If using with the DX9 verison it will never inject itself into the process. Pinball Arcade shows if it is DX9 or DX11 and the running version in the right hand lower corner of the screen for me during the logo launch screen.
  16. First, for any of you messing with VLC, there is a bug or something for some people where it won't save the screen it was last on unless you exit when the app (vlc) is NOT maximized. I was unable to get VLC to come up on my backglass screen by choosing the display device # in VLC, so I just moved VLC over to that screen and set everything else (DirectX Display device is set to Default) and made sure to have VLC windowed (not full screen) then closed it. Now it always launches on my backglass screen. Also many of my animated back glass files where .f4v, I just renamed them to .mp4 and they seem to all play OK. I tried that instead of adding the logic to account for .f4v besides .mp4 to the AHK. https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?t=109113 Had a chance to play with this today. Nice, with the animated backglass while playing in PBA, pretty much as polished as you can get. Here is a copy of my AHK, I had to modify it slightly due to my naming convention for my files being based on the description field: Process, Close, pinballx.exe FileRead, xmldata, C:\PinballX\Databases\PBA\PBA.xml doc := ComObjCreate("MSXML2.DOMDocument.6.0") doc.async := false doc.loadXML(xmldata) table = //game[@name='%1%']/description Node := doc.selectSingleNode(table) description:= Node.text bgmp4 = C:\PinballX\Media\PBA\Backglass Videos\%description%.mp4 ;Change paths and extentions throughout to match your setup bgpng = C:\PinballX\Media\PBA\Backglass Images\%description%.png if FileExist(bgmp4) Run C:\apps\vlc\vlc.exe --loop "C:\PinballX\Media\PBA\Backglass Videos\%description%.mp4" if FileExist(bgpng) Run C:\apps\vlc\vlc.exe --loop "C:\PinballX\Media\PBA\Backglass Images\%description%.png" Run C:\games\PinBallArcade\mod\TPAFreeCamMod.exe -table %1% ~Escape:: Process, Close, PinballArcade11.exe Process, Close, vlc.exe IniWrite, %description%%1%System_4, C:\Pinballx\Config\PinballX.ini, Internal, lastselected ;change drive letter and system number, for me its 2 in Other Systems so _2 IniWrite, All Tables, C:\Pinballx\Config\PinballX.ini, Internal, filtername Run C:\Pinballx\PinballX.exe ExitAPP return
  17. Yeah, that sounds great. If you don't mind sharing that would be great. Yeah I already have most of my animated back glass working for PBA in PinballX, it sounds like I could just play those video files then while in PBA. It has bugged me a little that viewing the tables in PinballX for PBA actually looks better than what you get when you launch the PBA table. (due to the static images of FCM for backglass) Which in my case it does not even stretch the image on my 3rd monitor. So it looks a little off. That would be much nicer looking and feel more polished then.
  18. I would be interested in seeing that, are you saying for use when PBA is running? Instead of the static images we are limited to, with FCM?
  19. Yeah, totally my mistake. With the work around and this, PBA in PinballX works great now.
  20. Thanks, I finally figured it out! I tried that exact version with the same results. After experimenting with other AHK XML examples and how sensitive it is to working based on the XML being formatted properly, I went over mine with a fine tooth comb and I was missing one </game> tag. It works perfect now.
  21. Thanks, what version AHK are you running? Maybe that is all it is then. I even added MsgBox %xmldata% after the fileread, and my PBA.xml is listed there, so it is loading my xml fine, I have tried different versions of AHK 1.1 with the same results, I also tried on a Windows 7 box to see if I got different results. I tried 1.0 versions and that must be before XML parsing was supported, and with 2.x it has some errors.
  22. Yes, I triple checked that to make sure. Here is what I switched to using to troubleshoot more quickly: Please let me know if I am missing something: FileRead, xmldata, C:\test.xml doc := ComObjCreate("MSXML2.DOMDocument.6.0") doc.async := false doc.loadXML(xmldata) table = //game[@name='%1%']/description Node := doc.selectSingleNode(table) description:= Node.text MsgBox %description% I then run this compiled as an exe (run.exe) to test: run AddamsFamily The MsBox is always blank. Does the table line need to take into account the <menu> piece of XML? Here is a snippet of my test.xml to show you the format of that: <menu> <game name="AddamsFamily"> <description>Addams Family</description> <rom></rom> <manufacturer>Bally</manufacturer> <year>1995</year> <type>SS</type> <hidedmd>False</hidedmd> <hidebackglass>False</hidebackglass> <enabled>True</enabled> <rating>0</rating> </game> <game name="AttackFromMars"> <description>Attack From Mars (Bally 1995)</description> <rom></rom> <manufacturer>Bally</manufacturer> <year>1995</year> <type>SS</type> <hidedmd>False</hidedmd> <hidebackglass>False</hidebackglass> <enabled>True</enabled> <rating>0</rating> </game> </menu> Thanks!
  23. <game name="AttackFromMars"> <description>Attack From Mars (Bally 1995)</description> <rom></rom> <manufacturer>Bally</manufacturer> <year>1995</year> <type>SS</type> <hidedmd>False</hidedmd> <hidebackglass>False</hidebackglass> <enabled>True</enabled> <rating>0</rating> </game> When I launch that game using your additions and exit, this is what gets written to my pinballx.ini: lastselected=AttackFromMarsSystem_4 Not: lastselected=Attack From Mars (Bally 1995)AttackFromMarsSystem_4 I don't believe the proper text is being extracted, I added Msgbox %description% after description := Node.txt and it is always blank So with: IniWrite, %description%%1%System_4, C:\Pinballx\Config\PinballX.ini, Internal, lastselected I am getting [null]AttackFromMarsSystem_4
  24. Awseome, will try this later tonight. Now I don't have to figure out a hack job to do the same Thanks!!
  25. Why don't you just kill pinballX like I am doing before you start FCM? I hope this weekend to play around with getting autohotkey to populate the pinballx.ini with the last table played saving. I posted about seeing this behavior we are experiencing a couple weeks ago.. What Windows version are you using? Same deal when I was doing my own script to skip through the menus in PBA, with PinballX running in the background, timing would be different almost every time. Sometimes it would work 2 times in a row, then fail 5 in a row. If this behavior occurs over all OS versions, maybe it can be fixed in PinballX?
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