SixOfTwelve

Just dropped in to say that the error continues to persist in v6.91 But I definitely found a pattern. Please bear with me, as it's a bit complicated. Every time I add a new "Other System", something gets pushed out, i.e. one system's logo suddenly is not displayed any more. So far, Pinball FX3 has lost its logo, then when I moved that to "Other Systems" and disabled the default Pinball FX3 System entry, Zaccaria dropped out. I created a Zaccaria "Other System" and disabled the default Zaccaria System, then Future Pinball lost its logo. Same procedure with Future Pinball, which caused Pinball FX2 to lose the logo, and once I replaced that, the Visual Pinball logo turned invisible. I may be hazy on the order since I tried a lot of things. Right, I thought, maybe the error has to do with the default Systems. So I added yet another Other System named "Visual Pinballs", copied over the database, the logo and the media file, and renamed them accordingly, and disabled the default Visual Pinball system. Now the "Visual Pinballs" logo displays properly, but a strange thing happened: The error wandered along the "Other Systems" chain. For every "Other System" created, the first one in the queue will lose its displayed logo. So in my case: I add "Visual Pinballs" instead of "Visual Pinball" as Other System #30, because Visual Pinball has lost its logo. Now my Other System #1, "MAME", has lost its logo. "Visual Pinballs" displays it. I disable Other System #1 and create Other System #31, "MAMEReal", and disable System #1. Now Other System #2, "Game Boy Advance", has lost its logo. "MAMEReal" displays it. However, I managed to find a workaround that seems to hold for now: I tried not disabling Other System #1. Instead, I just cleared the database so only one game remained, and unchecked "Enabled" for it. That way, the system still reads Other System #1 as valid but doesn't show any games. If it did, the logo would be missing. I can't say what will happen if I add more "Other System"s. But there is definitely something amiss, and it's reproducable. Logs and databases are attached. Sorry to be so obstinate about it. A question that has been bothering me, just for comparison's sake: Are my 700+ tables spread over 30 systems an abnormal amount that PinballX is having trouble with? What are other people's numbers here? Logs.zip

Just gave it a try - no joy, unfortunately. The -shiftx and -shifty commands go from -100 to +100 pixels only, so they're useless for shifting the playscreen, for example, 1920 pixels to the right. Also, going out of fullscreen with ALT+ENTER works, I can also pull the window over onto my backglass, but once I press ALT+ENTER again, the playscreen is displayed half on the playfield and half on the backglass - no matter how far I pull it over. The only luck I had so far was with starting the game without fullscreen, setting the resolution to that of my backglass in the BAT file (-x 1600 -y 1200, for my case), then dragging the screen over to the backglass. But then of course you have borders around the window and the Windows menu bar on top. I guess the dragging could be automated with AutoHotKey, and I know there are commands to remove Windows menu borders from program windows that can be found in the AutoHotKey help file. I could look into that, but I'll wait to make sure this is is even still an issue for you before I go digging. Drop a line if you're still interested!

I still haven't tried it, but according to the documentation of Hypseus Singe, you can set the x and y position of your video. I think it was originally intended to make the use of bezel graphics easier, but I guess you could use it to push the video onto another monitor as well. Here is the list of command line arguments: https://github.com/DirtBagXon/hypseus-singe/blob/master/doc/CmdLine.md The bezel command line arguments are listed separately: https://github.com/DirtBagXon/hypseus-singe/blob/master/doc/Bezels.md

I haven't tried it with Daphne or Hypseus, but I've had luck before with other games doing the following with AutoHotKey: - Turn all screens black (with the GUI command) - Start the game in non-fullscreen mode - Move the window to your desired monitor position - Send ALT+ENTER, or whatever puts the game into fullscreen mode - Remove the black GUI so the screen becomes visible. I'll have to check, but I think I did it for Rollers of the Realm. OP, if you're interested, I can dig out the script.

Update: Nope, I didn't remove the mistake, I just moved it along. Now that I created an "Other System" for Pinball FX3, suddenly the tables that were added with the standard "Future Pinball" menu are missing their "Future Pinball" logo. I tried the same thing, creating a "Other System" for Future Pinball, and now "Visual Pinball" is missing the logo. Interestingly, this only seems to happen for tables that are tied to the standard menu systems, not the "Other System" tables. Or maybe it's chronological? I add a new system, and the oldest ones get kicked out of memory? Or do I have too many "other system"s? Or too many tables? (Currently 714, which seems a lot) This is getting confusing. Logs are attached, along with databases, just to be sure. logs.zip

The original error (Pinball FX3 logo isn't showing) is still persisting in v6.89, but I found a workaround! @Tom Speirs - this may be of interest for you when troubleshooting. It seems it's not a general render error, or anything to do with the logo PNG file, but it seems to have something to do with the default Pinball FX3 menu settings. On a whim, I decided to add Pinball FX3 as an additional "Other System". I copied over all the values from the default Pinball FX3 menu. Just for funsies I named it "Finball PX3", copied over the FX3 media folder and the FX3 database (renamed of course), and created a "Finball PX3.png" copy of the FX3 logo. Tadaa! The logo shows up. So now I just disabled Pinball FX3 in the Settings menu and use my "Finball PX3" playlist. Problem solved, in a roundabout way. 🙂

There is a German phrase, "von hinten durch die Brust ins Auge". It translates as "from behind through the chest into the eye", meaning something that's done in a very cumbersome and roundabout way. It also describes the workaround I cobbled together to get things running more or less like I want them. 1. Your suggestion about rotating the playfield BEFORE starting Black Flaggers proved to be the key. I removed the "-rotate 90" command and ran a little tool called "Display" as my pre-game EXE. (http://noeld.com/programs.asp?cat=misc#display) This of course also meant that I needed to create a whole separate "Other System" category for Black Flaggers in PinballX. Never mind. Maybe it'll come in useful for other games in the future. 2. Now the loading file would still show up rotated, but for some reason it would show up ONLY on the playfield, not covering half the backglass as it did before. 3. I created a version of the standard loading video, rotated it by 90 degrees, and named it the same as my Black Flaggers loading EXE. Now it showed up the right way around, but stretched horizontally to about 200% width. 4. So I loaded the original standard loading video into my video editing software, shrunk the height (remember, it's not rotated yet) to 50%, repositioned it, exported it, and rotated it by 90 degrees. Now the video image sits to the left of the video frame and is only 50% as wide as it was before. 5. Now when I run Black Flaggers from PinballX, the screen is rotated 90 degrees, the loading video plays, but since it's stretched to about twice the width, the squeezed image now actually looks like the normal width. After 10 seconds, the video disappears, leaving me with the proper playfield. Now if that's now from the back through the chest into the eye, I don't know what is. 😁 In the end, one thing that came to my mind that might be very helpful: What process is used to play the loading video? If I knew the name of that process, I could just kill it and thus end the video playback in my AHK script five seconds sooner. (I tried having the task manager open while starting the table to find out the process name, but the task manager window was always getting covered up by other game windows, and by the time it was freed up again, the video had stopped playing.)

I keep running into the following weirdness: Since I'm not a fan of Tarcisio style wheels, I have my cab set up to display the game wheel images in an arc, with the system overlay on the top left and the company logo on the top right above it. However, the size of the logos varies wildly. See the following images: I'm guessing the display size of the system logo (here the "Visual Pinball" one) has to do with a combination of the size of the company logo and the wheel image. If I kew how it's calculated, I could resize my image accordingly. For reference, I've included the system, company and wheel images in the screenshots above. Logs are also included. Thank you! logs.zip

I have two questions: 1. What determines how long a video is being displayed? 2. Can I exclude a table from displaying a video or image? The reason for my questions: I recently installed the 2025 release version of Pinball Wicked: Black Flaggers on my cab. I created an .EXE from an AHK script that launches the game and sends "Enter" to start after a few seconds. Since I'm on a cab, I launch the game with the "-rotate 90" parameter. So far, so good, and when I run it from outside PinballX, I have no complaints. Unfortunately, the screen rotation screws up the loading video display. (I don't have a "Black Flaggers" loading screen, so I used a "Pirates of the Caribbean" one as placeholder for testing purposes. This is what it looks like when I launch the game: "No problem", I thought, "I'll just rotate the loading video 90 degrees as well, that should do the trick." Nope: I tried several more things: - a video that's 1x1 pixels, with a duration of 1 second - a transparent png file as a loading image - an empty text file that I renamed to [tablename].png in the hope that PinballX would just skip it if it couldn't read the file The results have always looked like this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-7HiHNvNaFo So - how do I solve this? I can't deactivate the loading videos for "Black Flaggers" - even if I don't have a loading video or image, my default loading video will play. I can't force the video to quit after a second - for some reason, it seems to stay on for ten seconds or so, regardless of the length of the actual video itself. Obligatory log files are attached. Grateful for any hints. logs.zip

D'oh. I should know better at this point, shouldn't I? The site still gives the "-200" error when I try to upload the .ini file, no matter whether it's unblocked or not, uploaded from a network share or a local drive, and even if I rename it to pinballx.txt. There's something in that file the server doesn't seem to like. At any rate, I zipped the files again. I also included two screenshots for illustration, of "Jaws" for Future Pinball and the Pinball FX3 version. You can also see the other system logos (Visual Pinball and Super Nintendo) on the titles above and below the active table. As before, the "Pinball FX3" logo simply does not display. PinballX.zip

Just wanted to chime in and say that the error persists in V6.88 😉

No idea if this helps you or not, or if it's even related - but I recently got back into the hobby after over a year, and after updating everything from VPX to VPINMAME to FLEXDMD I noticed that some tables took ages to close. It turned out that I needed to include skipanalytics = false in the [global] settings of my DmDDevice.ini file, and after that, the problem went away for me. (I had also severed my cab's connection to the internet - I don't want to be constantly reminded to upgrade to Windows 11 - so maybe the slowdown was due to FLEXDMD trying to send usage statistics and failing repeatedly)

files.zip I've been away for a while and haven't updated since version 6.02. Now I've downloaded version 6.74 and overwritten the old files (after having made a backup, of course). The update went smoothly, except for two things I've noticed: Some Table Audio sounds wouldn't play anymore, which was easily solved by opening the MP3 files in Audacity and exporting them again. Some needed to be saved as WAV in order to work, but no big deal. I guess the original MP3s were not up to standard. Now for the puzzling part: My PNG logo for Pinball FX3 in the System Overlay Logos folder is not being displayed any more. Things I've tried: - Resizing the PNG. It's not displaying. - Using another PNG. It's not displaying. - Replacing the PNG with another file that will display for other playlists, for example the Visual Pinball logo. It's not displaying. - Suspecting a faulty PNG, I tried it the other way round: replaced my Visual Pinball logo in my Visual Pinball playlist with the Pinball FX3 logo PNG file. Now the Visual Pinball tables are showing the Pinball FX3 logo instead of their usual logo. So at least I know the PNG isn't faulty and will display normally. All my other playlists display their system logos just fine - it's just Pinball FX3 that's the problem. I guess I could build an "Other System" playlist for Pinball FX3 and see if that solves it, but I thought I'd bring it to your attention in case it's an error that slipped in sometime during 6.02 and 6.74. Thank you! The INI file wouldn't upload (Server Error -200), so I put the log, the INI and the two PNG files (Pinball FX3 and Visual Pinball) into a ZIP file.

Well, it took a while, but I uploaded my current complete collection of Promo and Tutorial videos to the FTP server. The files are in -PinballX-\Other Uploads\SixOfTwelve. Have a look and see if there's anything you like. Share and enjoy!

@Tom Speirs: It's working beautifully now. Thank you so much! I tried donating a yearly membership, but it looks like I can only pay by credit card (which I don't have). Any chance of PayPal? @Mike_da_Spike: The FTP is a good idea, maybe it'll be useful to someone. It may take a bit of time though, as my VPin only has a crappy WiFi connection, and the videos are 120 GB all in all...

Thank YOU for your work. I'll have a look at the new version later today after I get home from work.

Thanks for looking into it. I downloaded most of the promo and tutorial videos from YouTube with 4K Video Downloader.

Before I add another EDIT to the original post... I played around a bit with installing different versions of PinballX, and I think I've narrowed the error down to the transition from 5.83 to 5.84. The release notes state "Detecting aspect ratio of playfield videos is now done using the actual aspect ratio rather than video size." Again, I suspect this may have led to videos that have more width than height being rotated. For reference, this is what the promo video should look like on my playfield:

Hey guys, I haven't visited and updated in a while, life got in the way as it sometimes does. I guess my last version was 5.55. A few days ago I upgraded to 6.01, and now I noticed that my promo and tutorial videos are rotated 90 degrees to the left and cut off at the top. Attached are the usual files, plus a screenshot of me running a promo video. Strangely enough, the timer is displayed in the right place. My monitor dimensions are: Playfield 1920x1080 Backglass 1600x1200 DMD 1280x720 Everything is set to landscape mode and 100% scaling. Running Windows 10. Table videos are running just fine. Help is much appreciated... EDIT 1: Temporarily reinstated my backup of V5.55, and the videos are displayed correctly. So I can rule out a Windows Update or graphics driver issues as the culprit. When I went back to 6.01 the videos were messed up again. EDIT 2: I did a bit more testing and found out that ONLY those videos seem to get rotated that are WIDER than they are high. Like a promo or tutorial video downloaded from YouTube at a 4:3 or 16:9 ratio will get rotated, but something that was filmed in portrait mode, like some of the PAPA tutorial videos, and is consequently rendered in 9:16 ratio, will play correctly. I guess that's also why my table videos are all displayed properly, since most of them are recorded at a resolution of 1080x1920. My guess is that this version of PinballX assumes that all videos should be higher than they are wide, and tries to overcorrect. EDIT 3: Also, I haven't been able to find information as to what exactly is new in version 6.01. Could anyone point me towards the info please? PinballX.ini log.txt

I second this request. For some reason, PinballX crashes when I set my VPX tables to forced fullscreen and try to quit them back to the frontend. There has been at least one thread about it, I never figured it out. I just turned forced fullscreen off and life was good. However, some tables do play a bit smoother with forced fullscreen on, and most of them also quit back to PinballX without incident. I guess a workaround would be to create two VPX databases, one for forced fullscreen and one for windowed, but it sure would be cool to be able to add -EnableTrueFullscreen or to the command line in the database. It might also be useful for a lot of other emulators too, I guess... :-)

Wildman of VPU fame has a pretty good tutorial on YouTube. It demystified the process a lot for me.

Yoku's Island Express is a charming little platformer from 2018 with pinball elements. It needs a few keys, but if you have the standard buttons on your cab, you should be able to play it. In this post, I'll show you the way I have set it up on my cabinet. Your mileage may vary, of course, but I'll explain the scripts I use as best I can. You also have to edit the game's config file, but it's a simple text file, so no problems there. Part 1: THE KEYS Required keys: - Flippers (obviously) - Walking left and right - Enter (Interact) - Space (Inventory) - Tab (Map) - Escape (Go to Menu) I've used an AutoHotKey script to remap the keys on my cab as follows: - Flippers remain Left Shift and Right Shift. - Walking is mapped to the Magnasave buttons, Left Control and Right Control - Enter remains mapped to the Launch Ball button, but I've also mapped it to all the other game buttons I have on my lockbar, namely F, H and J. - Escape is mapped to my Start button (1). The start button brings up the pause menu in most console games, so why not here too :-) - The Exit button kills the game process and the key mapping script. - Inventory and Map are mapped to my Coin (5) and "Change View" (i) respectively. If you don't have a "Change View" button, you could try mapping it to a buy-in button if you have one. Note that I also have a joystick on my cab, which can be useful for up and down movement in the pause menu and when selecting your game slot in the beginning. If you don't have up and down movement, you should still be able to play, but you can only select slot 1 at start. Here is the script I use: #NoEnv ; Recommended for performance and compatibility with future AutoHotkey releases. ; #Warn ; Enable warnings to assist with detecting common errors. SendMode Input ; Recommended for new scripts due to its superior speed and reliability. SetWorkingDir %A_ScriptDir% ; Ensures a consistent starting directory. ~LControl::Left ~RControl::Right $1::Esc $Esc:: { Process, Close, Yoku.exe } Return ~f::Enter ~h::Enter ~j::Enter ~5::Tab i::Space Part 2: THE CONFIG FILE You should find the game's config file, config.csv, in C:\Users\[YOUR USERNAME]\AppData\Roaming\Villa Gorilla\Yoku's Island Express . Simply open it with Notepad or a similar text editor. saveslot;0 language; video_mode;windowed video_resolution;0,0 video_exclusive_fullscreen_resolution;0,0 video_hud_enabled;1 video_trilinear_filtering_enabled;1 video_colorgrading_enabled;1 video_bloom;0 video_vingette_enabled;1 video_grass_enabled;1 video_grass_physics_enabled;1 video_shrubbery;1 video_caustics_enabled;1 video_extrude_enabled;1 video_maximum_frame_latency;1 video_texture_quality;0 video_vsync;1 video_gpu_skinning;0 volume_sfx;10 volume_music;10 volume_rumble;10 ui_platformicons;-1 ui_show_options;0 ui_show_quit_to_desktop;0 ui_show_boot_logos;0 demo_attract_mode;0 demo_demo_timer;0 demo_idle_timer;0 timer_enabled;0 The important changes are: video_mode needs to be set to windowed ui_show_options needs to be set to 0: This will stop players fiddling with your windowed/fullscreen/settings. ui_show_quit_to_desktop can be set to 0 but doesn't have to. Since the Exit button quits the game, showing a quit option in the menu is not really needed. ui_show_boot_logos speeds up the start, the Team17 and Villa Gorilla Intro videos are skipped and the game starts right away. Part 3: GETTING THE GAME ON THE BACKGLASS Here is where more AutoHotKey scripting comes in. I'll paste the script with annotations explaining what everything does. #NoEnv Recommended for performance and compatibility with future AutoHotkey releases. ; #Warn Enable warnings to assist with detecting common errors. ; SendMode Input Recommended for new scripts due to its superior speed and reliability. SetWorkingDir %A_ScriptDir% Ensures a consistent starting directory. #SingleInstance force ; Stop user input from being registered until the script has done everything it needs to do BlockInput, on ; Run the game. You need to change this line to fit your directory. Run, C:\games\YokusIslandExpress\Yoku.exe ; Cover the playfield monitor in black Gui, Color, black Gui +AlwaysOnTop Gui -Caption Gui, Show, x0 y0 w%A_ScreenWidth% h%A_ScreenHeight% ; Wait a bit, then set the game window as active Sleep, 500 WinActivate, Yoku's Island Express Sleep, 500 ; Wait a bit more to make sure everything is active so far (you may have to change the 3000 value depending on how fast your machine is), then run two important scripts Sleep, 3000 ; Run a script that will monitor the game process and will kill all necessary programs if the game is no longer running run, ifitexists_yoku.exe ; Run the key remapping script run, keys_yoku.exe ; Just some precautions that helped me in the past on other Windows games... ; These may not even be needed here, but this should remove any Windows-style frames around the window. ; You can probably delete these lines now that I think about it, since the game is set to windowed fullscreen. WinSet, AlwaysOnTop, ON, A WinGet, id1, ID, A WinSet, Style, -0xC00000, ahk_id %id1% ; Move the game window to the Backglass monitor. ; This assumes that your Backglass is monitor 2 and your Playfield is monitor 1. ; Change the 1920 value to whatever the width of your Playfield monitor is. My resolution happens to be 1920x1080. Sleep, 100 WinMove, Yoku's Island Express, , 1920, 0 ; Maximize the game window, resizing it to the width of your Backglass monitor. ; I need this step because my Backglass has a resolution of 1600x1200. ; If I moved the game window without resizing, it would bleed over onto my 3rd screen, ; since the game window would still be at a width of 1920. Sleep, 100 WinMaximize, Yoku's Island Express ; Again, not sure if this is still needed. ; In some other Windows games, a command input window would pop open in the background, and this will hide it. Sleep, 1000 WinHide, C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe ; Finally, re-enable user input. BlockInput, off Part 4: THE "IF IT EXISTS" SCRIPT As you can see above, the start script not only runs a key remapping script, but also another script to see if the game is still running. This script monitors the yoku.exe process. While it's running, the script will take no action. If yoku.exe is no longer running, the script will kill the start script and the key mapping script, and also remove the black GUI that was put over the playfield. #NoEnv ; Recommended for performance and compatibility with future AutoHotkey releases. ; #Warn ; Enable warnings to assist with detecting common errors. SendMode Input ; Recommended for new scripts due to its superior speed and reliability. SetWorkingDir %A_ScriptDir% ; Ensures a consistent starting directory. ProcessName = Yoku.exe loop { Process, Exist, %ProcessName% ; check to see if it is running If (ErrorLevel = 0) ; If it is not running { Gui, Destroy Process, close, keys_yoku.exe Process, close, run_yoku.exe ExitApp } Else ; If it is running, do nothing. { } } Part 5: THAT'S IT So here you are. I know some parts of the scripts may be clunky and/or redundant (which is partly a result of me recycling some of my scripts for other games and partly a result of me not being a programmer), but they work for me. Have fun and let me know if it worked for you! config.csv ifitexists_yoku.ahk keys_yoku.ahk run_yoku.ahk

Thanks for the video link anyway, MrGrynch! In my case it's a bit different - I'm using DMD images in PinballX to display the year of the table in big DMD-style letters. So my PinballX looks like Backglass: Animated Backglass video DMD: Year of the Table Playfield: Static table image (I found more than one moving image too distracting) with the game's wheel image overlaid. Since the style of the DMD stays the same, it gives some feeling of uniformity to the menu. When I start a table I want a video or image displayed that wasn't visible in the PinballX menu before - so I think I'm going to need a PuP-Pack for that. EDIT: Did it. That was so easy! Best of all: If I name the DMD video something generic, like "video.mp4", I can just copy and paste the PuP-Pack folder, rename the copied folder to the ROM name I need and swap out the video file. It's perfect! :-D

I'm planning on doing exactly that - create a few PuP packs for modern tables that could use a bit of flourish (or a static image video) around the DMD. Would you happen to have any useful video tutorials you could point me at? Or maybe care to share a simple DMD-only PuP-pack that I could then edit and replace the video file?

Thanks, but editing 300+ instruction cards is hardly an option (80% of them in SWF format, no less) I've dropped a feature request. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!