dogberry

Excellent stuff, thank you! I got Visual Pinball working, with nearly every table/rom I tried! I even created a very basic one from scratch! Sadly, the PC that I dug out for using in a full size table died about 5 minutes after booting it into Win10 last night - it was quite a decent spec'ed machine with decent graphics etc... (albeit a little out of date by today's standards). So, I'll be spending more time getting all the software set up on my laptop until I find a replacement. Thanks for the advice! Truly appreciated.

Hi. Thanks for the replies. I was getting a little frustrated yesterday, as was evident in my post. I'm a huge fan of open-source software, so completely understand. I'll be persevering and will get some proper time at the weekend to start again from scratch with Visual Pinball.

To be honest, from a newbie's point of view, it looks very much like this software isn't even close to being finished. I appreciate the work that goes into it, but it should be versioned at something like 0.01Beta or similar - it certainly doesn't seem ready for the general public yet. Contents don't scale when sized, the windows don't close when the close button is clicked, the keyboard doesn't have much affect and certainly isn't reflected in the setup etc... it all seems like it's a very early Alpha release. I'm not trying to get anyone's back up, it's just an honest first impression.

Hi, yep. I tried to change the flippers to left/right mouse click - still nothing. It still says "L-Shift" and "R-Shift" above it and those don't work either. I have, however, managed to pull the plunger back with the Enter key - so the focus is there, it's just selectively ignoring the other keys. Q does quit as well, so it clearly recognises some. Also, the pop-out screens should close when hitting the "corner X" but they don't - they stay on the screen. I'm running Windows 10, i7-8700K with 12 CPUs and 32GB ram, with an NVidia Quadro P1000, so it should be "man enough" to run this, yes?

Thanks. I've downloaded it again. It definitely says "10.5.0 Final". No matter. It now seems to try and run the table regardless of the error, but now I can't do anything at all. It opens full screen and no matter what key on the keyboard I press, I get no response. I pressed every single key in an attempt to get it to at least move the flipper, but I get zilch.

Thanks, but it says it's version 10.5.0 Final, which it isn't. This is 10.60 - at least that's what I downloaded. I browse to a table and get the error mentioned above.

Hi, thanks for the reply. I have Visual Pinball installed, but have not been able to get that working either. If I open any table with it, it says, "This table was saved with version 10.60 and is newer than the supported version 10.40" - I have 10.6 installed. I installed earlier versions as well, and no combination of table/version of Visual Pinball would load without this error. Once that error comes up, then I lose the mouse over any Visual Pinball screens. I saw that document earlier, and headed over to vpuniverse, but their registration screen wasn't working so couldn't sign up - it would just send me round and round in circles with no error, even with the random question answered correctly (I had to google a few of the answers). I emailed them, but have had no response as yet. It's all getting a little downheartening already - I've seen the videos of people getting this up and running, but I can't see how they did it without superhuman levels of patience.

Hi. I simply can't get it to do anything. It comes up with the menu, and if I select "Play Game", then the screen says "Loading", and then it takes me back to the menu again. That was the doc I found. I followed what was in it, but most of what was in there was obvious. It's the non-obvious stuff that I'm struggling with. Things like in the Settings app, under Keyboard Input Settings, it says "Plunger - [Keycode-ALT]" - if you press ALT, then the screen pauses. It says "Select/Start - Keycode-ENTER", but pressing ENTER only brings up the menu. I have no idea how to start the game. I have pressed every single key on the keyboard.

Hi all, I appear to have gone down the wrong rabbit hole! I've downloaded PinballX, read the FAQs, downloaded the Word Doc, googled, watched YouTube videos, and am as yet still unable to work out how to actually load a table and play it. I'm intending to build a full-size table but am falling at the first hurdle. Is there a simple, step-by-step guide to get up and running? Where to put files, how to configure the keys on a keyboard so that they do what they say they're going to in the Setup etc....?

I think it would have to be a 'ground-up' effort, rather than a straight port. With the future of Mono in the balance since the Attachmate buyout of Novell, it's unlikely that the Mono project (in it's current form) would move anywhere past where it is now, and I suspect the legalities of using it for Gnu type projects, given it's legal history, will only get worse. Whilst mono is bloody excellent, I don't think it's right to use it at the moment - meaning that the dot net framework, the DirectX support etc... is a no-no for anything other than Windows. With that said, I don't propose that this would be a 'Gameex clone' - rather a new project from the ground up. I'm still slightly worried that XBMC does all that is needed aside from the emulator plugins - which could be rectified with Python scripting - meaning a lot of duplication of effort to achieve something that not only has already been done, but has been done extremely well.

Absolutely agree - there's a whole host of reasons FOR doing this. I like the idea of the web interface - just like Myth. I use Myth at home extensively - it's our main way of watching TV, and I use the web interface a LOT! I've started work on a shell, with a single XML file for configuration. I have another test where I'm picking up the snap movies from the default mame snap folder and displaying them. So far, it's written in Pythin using the Pygame SDL layer. I have: an animation class, so that you can simply instigate the class with an object (movie, png, jpg etc...) and tell it which animation you want it to perform - so far, I have slide (left, right top, botton, [speed], [acceleration], [deceleration]) and swing. The menu class simply displays a menu with a given highlight graphic and opacity level as can be seen in the screenshot. This is a *very* early work-in-progress so don't get all excited on me - there's about a million miles to go! The background image is drawn from the XML config file. I have in mind that I'll write a config-frontend with a web interface once I get the main crux of it underway. Hopefully, there'll be enough interest that I'll start a sourceforge project and just hope that I'm not the only one developing! If anyone has any graphics skills (for a default skin) but no programming skills, then I'd be very happy to hear from them ;-) Likewise, any Python skills, particularly with Pygame or Pyglet would be extremely welcome. Python is more of a hobbyiest tool for me - I've not really used it in anger - I'm a dot net (C#) developer by day, but I use Python for my ongoing DIY-Home-Automation project as I'm exclusively a Linux user at home. Currently, this has only been run on Ubuntu 10.10 and Windows 7. It's identical on both so far. My other thought was that I could perhaps just write a plugin for XBMC - it has a Python interpreter built in and is already cross platform - that would take care of the Videos/Music/Pictures etc... straight away. If memory serves me right, there used to be a MAME plugin for XBMC - I can't think of any reason why not build on that, but I'm happy to be put straight.

Sorry for resurrecting this, but for the last few weeks I've been thinking of putting together something like gameex/hyperspin for Linux, possibly creating a dedicated distro so that even non-technical people can simply boot from the disc and be up and running in very little time. It's not a small undertaking and I'd need some serious help, but I'm willing to start the ball rolling. My first thoughts are that we'd need a plan of some description - I'm a dot net developer by day, python/c#(mono)/anything at all developer by night. I'm thinking of Pygame/Pyglet/Python simply because it satisfies the GPL requirements and is cross platform with a tonne of support out there, plus I think 2D graphics are all that's needed (that's not to say there isn't support for 3D in Python, but I don't think it's as stable/supported as the 2D SDL wrapper in Pygame). Plus, being Python, it would make development of plug-ins etc... a lot easier. Is anyone in?