JSpradlin

This may have been addressed before, but I couldn't find it. After updating to the later versions of PinballX (currently 3.29) my directB2S backglasses no longer display in attract mode. I get just a blank black screen on VP games while I get the default PinballX screen with Future Pinball (which makes since on FP). Any ideas? I have never used recorded videos for VP always relied on the backglass files. Thanks.

At any rate I think I'm good to go now. It was just a chore. At this point it shouldn't be too terrible to maintain. Thanks for all of your feedback.

My assumption or understanding was that the Wheel Image, Flyer, Instruction Card names had to match to the game name not the game description. Was I wrong in that? When I named my game files using author and such with the description "Table Name" ("Manufacturer" "Year") that is when I had trouble with files not matching. If it matches to game description with file matching off then I just wasted a ton of time renaming my table files (ugh!) Anyway, I ended up just naming my table files exactly like my descriptions. Then to keep track of the version/author, I just created a couple of custom property tags under Windows and saved them there. I love PinballX. It's a great piece of software, but that file matching stuff is the bane. Oh well.

Yeah Yeah. The only problem with that is I like to be able to see the version I have quickly so that when I check to see if anything new has been released I can tell without opening the table in VP/PinballX. I think I'm just going to go through and add a couple of properties to the file details (author and version) in Windows so I can check it that way but still name the file simply. This will be easy to maintain after the pain of initial setup.

I assume file matching has to be on for this to work. Is that correct?

This might be a dumb question, but can instruction cards be multi-page?

One other request. Can we get an update to file matching. It has become my nemesis in PinballX. The dilemma I have is when it comes to table naming I have a system that file matching sometimes stumbles on. My format is... table_name (manufacturer year) author version eg. Ali (Stern 1980) JPSalas v1.3 The problem I have is that with file matching off I have to name may media files exactingly. This creates a real hassle because if I update a table I also have to change the name on every related file. Conversely, with file matching on I'm theoretically able to just name my media files "Ali (Stern 2003)" and it should match. This works fine except when there are similar file names. For instance PinballX matches "Ali" to "Alien Star" on instruction card....and don't even get me started with all the tables that start with the word "Black." For some reason, once file matching hits a space in the table name it's hit and miss on matching the following unique characters. I'm almost to the point where I have to name the tables simply like "Ali (Stern 1980)" and keep track of the version info in a spreadsheet which I don't really want to do. If this has been addressed before I apologize. Thanks.

I'm not sure if this has been requested before, but would it be possible to increase the limit on the number of images that can be read from the Company Logo media folder. The limit seems to be 60. While I realize this seems like more than enough, I am actually at the limit as I have multiple manufacturer logos for many of the companies based on time period. Thanks.

Thanks for the response Carny. I figured that out by testing testing and moving some things around. I guess I should have checked back here first and saved myself some time. The limit appears to be 60. I may have to request an update if it's not hard to increase. But since I'm probably the only person here bumping into that limit I don't think it'll be much of a priority.

Additionally I did a bit more testing that has really left me confused. One of the tables that isn't displaying the company logo is America's Most Haunted. It is the only table that uses the 'Spooky Pinball, LLC' logo. I tried changing the name to simply 'Spooky' and updated the XML. It still wouldn't display. So I tried changing the <manufacturer></manufacturer> entry to one of the Gottlieb logos and it displayed fine. This leads me to believe that the problem has to do with the logo file itself and not the name. This is odd for two reasons. First, the logos were working fine a couple of days ago. Second, they don't seem to be any different than the logos that are working. All logos are what I would consider standard PNG files. I even tried opening the logo in GIMP and reexporting it with the usual PNG settings and still no luck.

So I have been working vigorously to get my cabinet set up as completely as possible. I have been going through and removing duplicate tables and trying to make sure I have all media - wheel images, flyers, company logos. And the latter is where I'm suddenly having an issue. I decided that I wanted to be as thorough and exacting as possible, so instead of just having a single company logo for each manufacturer I have logos corresponding to the specific time period that the machine was created. I differentiate them by giving them unique names. The following are some examples. Bally Bally Manufacturing Company / Bally Manufacturing Corporation / Bally Midway Manufacturing Company / Bally Midway Manufacturing Company Gottlieb D. Gottlieb and Company (Gottlieb) / D. Gottlieb and Company, Columbia Pictures / D. Gottlieb and Company / Premier Technology (Gottlieb) Stern Stern Electronics, Incorporated / Stern Pinball, Incorporated / Stern Pinball Williams Williams Electronics Games, Incorporated / Williams Electronics Manufacturing Company / Williams Electronics, Incorporated This was working in my cabinet for a while but then out of the blue certain manufacturers would show me the "No Image" logo. This may have happened after a program update, but I'm not completely sure. However a computer that I had a a different location for testing and setup while away from the cabinet continued to display the images properly. That is until last night when I updated to PinballX 2.50. Now I'm having the same issue. The strange thing is that my old PinballX.ini which I saved previous to the last update doesn't really appear to have any different settings than the new one (at least not settings that should affect logo display). What's even stranger is that some of the logos still display fine. For instance the Bally and Gottlieb sets seem to all display, while the Stern and Williams don't. Because of this, I can't see a common thread that could be causing the problem. I originally thought that maybe the names were not unique enough, but that would seem to be a problem with the Bally and Gottlieb images if that were the case. I also thought maybe PinballX was having a problem with the commas in the names, but again, some of the Gottlieb files work fine with commas. When this first happened on the cabinet, I tried shortening the names to abbreviations. I tried SEI and SPI for Stern Electronics Incorporated and Stern Pinball Incorporated and the images still wouldn't display. I'd really like to get this resolved as I have put a lot of time into finding/making the unique company logos and researching to proper logo associated with each machine. I've included a screen shot of my Company Logos folder contents, my PinballX.ini file, and a few screen shot of my database files to show a few tables that are't showing the logos. Thanks, J PinballX.ini

So I read that if I changed the name of the PinballArcade11.exe file to PinballArcade.exe it would launch as DX11. I did, and clicking on this file directly did indeed launch in DX11. Apparently this is temporary as it changes back when Steam updates. This is fine as I really only need it to test. The problem is that renaming it and updating the Settings.INI file did not solve my problem with the FreeCamMod. I still get the following warning and the TPA does not go past the Click Enter page.

So the DX9 vs DX11 thing seems to be an issue with how the game is launched. I was testing this on the free version of TPA through Steam that only has the TOTAN table. After investigating this issue on the Steam message boards I found that the only way to get the DX11 version to run (at least when using the free table feature) is to hit Play in Steam. You are then given the option to choose between DX9 and DX11. Choosing DX11 this way does give me the DX11 version. However if I try running PinballArcade11.exe from the C:\Steam\steamapps\common\PinballArcade directory it always launches DX9. This may all be because I'm trying to use the free version. It's a shame they only offer table packs. I'd be fine paying $3 to test a table, but I hate to drop $30 only to find out I can't get this working.

Am I also correct that if I run dxdiag from the command prompt the line... DirectX Version: DirectX 12 ...under the System tab indicates that my video card is running DierectX 12 or is that just the latest version installed on the OS? In other words is this displaying the capabilities of the OS or is this indicative of my display drivers? The Display tab makes no direct mention of DirectX Version.

So it turns out that PinballX does not like quotation marks in the Description field (even when using the &quot; syntax). Four tiny little lines create a big hassle.