byancey

Same here. Must be some type of server problem, since it's clearly checking the internet to determine if the program has expired. I didn't even realize PinballX was checking-in online on each startup. In any case, thanks for the workaround...at least I'm up and running again. Today is my last day of break before going back to work, and it would have been a pity if I couldn't get PinballX running.

I assumed it was something along these lines...the only thing that surprised me was that in addition to setting the type to custom, I also had to rename the VPinball executable to prevent PinballX from jumping in and doing it's thing...at least that's what I observed in my troubleshooting. In any case, I did come up with a second solution that seems to do the trick as well, and I think I prefer it to renaming the VPinball binary. I threw together an ahk script that I launch using the Launch Before dialog. The script waits for the DMD window to go active, delays a few seconds while PinballX resizes the window, and then jumps in and puts it back to the desired size. This keeps the tie between PinballX and VPinball in place so that hopefully other integrated features will work as expected. BTW. Thanks for the quick reply to several of my recent posts!!!

Well, it figures that the next thing I tried after posting my question appears to have worked. I made a copy of VPinballX.exe and re-named it VPBlah.exe and then changed my custom configuration to call VPBlah.exe instead of VPinballX.exe. That was apparently enough, as PinballX doesn't recognize that it's running VPX, and hence, it leaves the DMD size alone when I launch a table. Everything appears to be working...but that's an observation based on very little actual testing. While this appears to have worked, and I intend to move forward integrating Visual Pinball into PinballX using a renamed executable, I'm still not sure why it was necessary to trick PinballX into not doing something that I'm not entirely sure why it was doing in the first place. If anyone has any insight as to why my approach might be a bad idea, I'd love to hear it. More often than not, working around an issue in this manner often has a way of coming back to haunt me later. For example...high score support, which I really haven't looked into yet, but am certainly interested in.

With no small effort I have finally manged to integrate Pinball FX2, Pro-Pinball (Timeshock), and Future Pinball into PinballX. This is a 3 monitor setup, where the 3rd "DMD" monitor is masked into a DMD space, with a smaller "Logo" space beneath it. I've just been making custom DMD videos or images that incorporate both the DMD and the logo into the correct locations and set hidedmd to false for my games. When a game launches, the in-game DMD is overlayed above the DMD video and the logo remains visible playing beneath it while the game is running. This was working great until I tried introducing Visual Pinball X into my system. I got everything up and running in the correct locations using the VPX editor to launch the games, and then figured it would be a simple matter to drop the games into PinballX. To my surprise, every time I launch a VPX table from PinballX, it completely resizes my DMD to full screen, stretching and distorting it in the process. I finally determined that when PinballX launches a VPX table, it grabs the DMD size settings from the PinballX configuration and uses that to resize the VPX DMD. This value is set to 1366x768 to accommodate my custom DMD videos with logos beneath them. I'm not sure why it does this for VPX rather than just letting the in-game DMD overlay the PinballX DMD as it does with every other system, but I've been unable to determine a method to stop it from doing this. Here's what I've tried so far: Toggled the value for hidedmd in the game xml files. This has no impact on resizing of the VPX DMD. Tried setting this up in both the Visual Pinball section, as well as the Custom Section under a VPX entry. No impact. Tried toggling the custom game type from Visual Pinball to Custom. No impact...somehow it still knows it's launching a VPX table and does it's regular meddling with the DMD size. Is there a way I can get PinballX to just leave the DMD size setting untouched when it launches VPX? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Just another quick update, as I did a clean install and discovered that what I though had addressed the issue, actually didn't. In copying the Future Pinball binaries and FPLoader outside of "Program Files", some of the compatibility settings I had changed for those executable files were reverted back to default. Apparently running a program in compatibility mode requires admin, so when comparability mode was dropped, the UAC prompt was no longer required. If I turn compatibility mode back on for the FP binary, the UAC prompt is required even if the binary is outside of Program Files. I had originally enabled compatibility mode for Window XP Service Pack 3 because I was getting script errors in most of the tables I loaded...and these errors went away with compatibility mode enabled. Since these tables ran fine after I moved the executable, I didn't even notice the setting had reverted. Turns out, launching the table once with compatibility mode enabled updates something persistent in future pinball, because after the table has run successfully once, it can be launched without compatability mode and continue to run fine. So, my final solution to eliminate the UAC prompts was actually to simply revert the compatibly mode settings for the FP binary. I setup a copy of the binary that does have compatibility mode enabled which I can run once manually on any new tables that have the script issue I observed.

Disabling UAC had the effect that many built-in Microsoft apps would not run (Edge, Photos, etc.). They complained about needing to be run from a non-admin account. I know I've read while setting up my Pinball machine that some apps should not be installed in "Program Files" or "Program Files (x86)", though no explanation as to why. I assume it my be related to UAC. I actually have a "Program Files (SSD)" folder that I created where I've been installing apps I want to ensure remain on my SSD. Since this folder is neither "Program Files" nor "Program Files (x86)", I thought it would be OK, but I guess windows simply treats the "Program Files" prefix differently in general.. As a test, I moved my PinballX folder outside of Program Files (SSD), re-enabled UAC, and now FPLoader will run without needing to be escalated. This seems like a cleaner soluition, though I'm going to have to go back and update a lot of paths in my config files. Thanks for the tip.

That's actually what I ended up doing. I found the following steps and used them to completely disable UAC: To turn off UAC completely, use RegEdit to find the following registry key and change the value of EnableLUA to 0. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\System This did the trick. Perhaps not a very secure approach...but then again, this PC is being used for one thing only...to be a Pinball Cabinet.

I'm surprised I didn't find an existing post regarding this issue. For my cabinet build I'm running PinballX on windows 10. I have PinballFX2 and ProPinball working with no issues. I'm in the process of adding support for Future Pinball which I'm loading via FPLoader (BAM). I've got a few tables launching correctly from PinballX, with one big caveat. FPLoader must be run with Administrator privledges, and as such, each time I launch a table I get a UAC prompt from Windows asking for confirmation to run FPLoader escalated. I have to pull out a keyboard and confirm the dialog to actually get the tables to launch. I tried creating a shortcut to task scheduler task that will launch FPLoader without a prompt, but PinballX won't run the shortcut. The other things I'm looking into is launching the task scheduler task directly from PinballX, or possibly using AutoHotKey to dismiss the dialog. However, It's not clear to me that either of these approaches will work well (if at all). Thought I'd check in and see how others here have dealt with this issue. Thanks!