SixOfTwelve

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!

A humble feature request for future versions: Would it be possible to add an option to turn off menu visibility as long as an instruction card is visible? I've had people confused on what to do (namely, press exit to quit the instructions) because they think the menu is still operable (it's visible, just not responsive). Or perhaps an option to display an overlay of choice (even if it's just a black screen) while the instructions are shown? Thank you!

I've noticed a few of my visitors are confused with one aspect of the menu handling in PinballX. Navigating with LEFT and RIGHT FLIPPER, pressing START to activate a menu and EXIT to cancel comes easy to most. When flyer images or tutorial videos are shown on the backglass, it's also fairly obvious that you can quit them with the EXIT button. What tends to confuse people is that when instruction cards are displayed, the whole menu is still visible on the playfield, and rather than pushing EXIT, they try to continue navigating with LEFT and RIGHT, trying to select an item from the (now unresponsive) menu. Is there a way to turn off menu visibility as long as an instruction card is visible?

Got finished earlier than I thought and was able to test it. No change for me either, and as soon as I switch to exclusive fullscreen, PinballX does the "freezing on exit" again.

I'll be able to try tomorrow, but seeing as I exit Visual Pinball via a script that kills the vpinballx.exe process, I'm not sure how much help my findings will be. I will report back though!

After some more testing, I think I can say that that it was definitely turning off exclusive fullscreen mode in VPX that did the trick. Weirdly enough, it never made trouble before. Maybe a Windows update changed something in the way my graphics card handles things, I don't know.

I think I may have cracked it: The error doesn't seem to occur when I launch my VPX tables in windowed fullscreen instead of exclusive fullscreen. I've been testing random tables (scripted, VPinMAME, with DMD and without, with Pup-Packs and without) for the last 45 minutes without any issues. Of course not having exclusive fullscreen may lead to the problem of some tables not having focus when they start up, but that's easily fixed with a script that watches for the "Visual Pinball Player" window and activates it if it's not on top. I'll keep the thread open for a bit longer while I do some more testing.

Got another weird one: PinballX will randomly freeze after I close vpx tables. I tried running PinballX in windowed mode to check for error messages, but there is none. It just stops working, stuck on the loading animation. Event viewer simply tells me the program has stopped communication with Windows. I first noticed the problem on tables that utilize Pinup Player, but now it seems other tables are affected too. The problem seems to affect newer tables rather than older ones. Future Pinball tables that use the PuP Player will exit back to the menu normally. So will all other emulators I've set up. It seems to be purely a VPX issue. The tables launch without errors from VPX standalone, and will close back to windows without issues. From day one I've had the problem that Esc doesn't close VPX for me from out of PinballX, so I wrote a start script that on Esc kills pretty much everything that VPX could reasonably start. I've attached it as pinkeysx.ahk . Things I've already tried: - deleted the temp folder - reinstalled latest version of PinballX - reinstalled latest version of Pinup Player - reinstalled latest version of Backglass Server - reinstalled latest non-beta version of VPX (10.7.0) - installed latest Windows updates - checked VPX, PinballX, VPinMAME and Backglass Server exe files: None of them are running as admin, none are set to compatibility mode. I'm at my wits' end. A few days ago, everything was working fine. I can't think of anything else I changed, apart from applying the 4GB patch to the Backglass Server exe in order to run the newly released Wizard of Oz table. But after my problems started, I copied back the original exe. And at any rate, I reinstalled and re-registered the backglass server, so the new version is unpatched. Another issue I've noticed, which may be related to the problem: When I restart PinballX after a crash, the starting game will NOT be the one I last exited successfully (in my case, "Alle Neune"). I don't know where PinballX is pulling this game from. Even weirder, if after the restart I start a VPX table and am able to exit it successfully (in my case "AC/DC"), the PinballX menu will NOT display AC/DC after exiting the table, but "Alle Neune" again. Maybe my database is corrupted? If so, are there ways to fix it? Speculations: - Is the database corrupt? To test this, I added an additional system named "VPX Test" which also runs VPX tables. This leads to the same crashing problems, leading me to believe that the database isn't the problem. - Not enough memory? My system is an i7 with 8GB of RAM, running in cab mode with 3 screens, no LED toys or similar, just a VirtuaPin plunger. I have ample hard disk space left. I could see that maybe RAM may be an issue, but until a few days ago, everything was running smoothly. Then again, I have just cracked the 300 tables mark on PinballX. Could that affect things? log.txt PinballX.ini pinkeysx.ahk

For what it's worth, I built an AHK script that rotates my playfield to portrait mode when I press a certain key combination and back to landscape when I press another. For some reason, the often-quoted ctrl+alt+arrow keys didn't work for me. I also have a NAS share mapped, since I tend to do my downloading, my frontend graphics/videos and my table sound editing on another computer with a comfortable chair. And - at least while I'm still in the process of setting everything up - I have a wooden board wrapped in a bright pink towel that I can place on the playfield without scratching it. It's just the right size for holding my keyboard and mouse. It's a totally ghetto solution, but it works. Feel free to mock mercilessly.

I don't rightly remember, to be honest. Hitting the exit key didn't always work for everything (especially older Windows games and similarly exotic stuff), so one day I switched to adding the AHK scripts for certain systems and it just worked. Never thought to question it, never had the time or the nerve to change it (shrug)

Kids are the best beta testers though, because they do things that would never occur to you! A game crashes the frontend because the kid is impatient and presses the exit key five times before the game has loaded properly? Time to finally add BlockInput commands to your AHK start script.

I'm using a 1TB SSD that's not even 25% full, so disk space was never the issue. My guess is that either me or my kid must have crashed PinballX at some point, and that may have created corrupted temp files.

Clearing out the temp folder did the trick! Thank you so much!

Date and time don't shop up either. BUT! As soon as I switch to windowed mode, the text (scrolling as well as date/time) shows up, so it's some kind of problem with the full screen mode. Also, it doesn't matter if I go windowed or non-windowed fullscreen, the text is still invisible. Windowed: Full screen: