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Hi, following up on this thread, http://www.gameex.info/forums/topic/15882-visual-pinball-mini-dmd-screen-3-b2s-for-apron/ , I've added a new feature: a flash viewer that displays instruction and score cards associated with the table. Requires ffmpeg and Adobe flashplayer http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/ https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ As a demo, here's a crappy phone video https://www.dropbox.com/s/nrgpig9azh1b28b/afm.MOV?dl=0 This is a kludgy solution requiring multiple scripts, but it supports swf and png formats (same as PBX) including animated instruction cards. The downside is that all of the instruction card media that is available on the FTP or at VPForums are oriented for viewing on the BG screen which is usually configured for landscape. VP Cabinet tables are rotated in the program to be viewed in portrait but the screen back buffer is still oriented in landscape. This means that the media that I want to display on the apron must also be rotated. Sadly, I found a high percentage of the media could not be directly converted and rotated. So, I could not just simply convert files from the PBX Instruction Cards folder on-the-fly. I had to do screen caps and rotate the resulting images and store them in a folder prior to running the script. I have a batch script that will be included in this post. The output will need to be stored in a separate folder, and secondary score or price cards should be stored in a new folder named "Score Cards". By default I scale the images using the aspect ratio for Stern and latter day Williams/Bally as reference here: http://www.pinballrebel.com/pinball/cards/Card_sizes.htm It is possible to properly scale and display all the rotated images by manufacturer, but that might be a future update. Similar to the previous script, the correct media is displayed based on matching file names to entries in VisualPinball.xml. Matching images for the table are presented in a loop until VP is closed. I've attached a generic Instructions card and a Score card which I display at the beginning of the loop. In my collection, I have an instruction card for every table installed. So, between the generic card and the card associated with the table, I always expect that there will be multiple images to loop. Instruction cards are displayed on the left side of the apron. I don't have score or price cards for most tables, so the generic price card would be all that there is to loop. Rather than loop the same image, I have some code to check the number of files in the loop and if it is just 1 image then the program will not loop. Score cards are displayed on the right side of the apron. The script assumes the playfield aspect ratio is 1920x1080. If your screen is something different then the script must be tweaked to properly scale the images. I have not tested against all tables, but hopefully the images are not covering any play areas. The X,Y coordinates for displaying the images are user configurable. Consider where the instruction and score card images will be displayed, and leave room for the mini-DMD which will be automatically placed below the instruction and score card. The scaling of images is automated based on the the width of DMD defined in the VPM registry or in screenres.txt along with the Filter setting in the User Input section at the top of the script, so that the card images will be lined up directly over the mini-DMD. Card_Width is a failsafe setting in case there happens to be a table installed that does not use VPM and B2S is set to False in the xml. I haven't tested it. I'm not sure I have that situation in my install. The amount of time each images will be displayed before looping to the next is also user configurable at the top of the script. This is definitely for advanced users. This requires a custom xml as explained in the thread for the previous script. I may also be using different VP executables, so the script may require tweaking to fit another install. This is a secondary script for looping instruction cards. It must be compiled and named DisplayCard1.exe This is a secondary script for looping score cards. It must be compiled and named DisplayCard2.exe And here is the ffmpeg batch converter for rotating instruction cards for use in the viewer. You define where the source images are and the script will convert and save the images in %A_ScriptDir%\rotate. arrayc is where you define any animated instruction cards. There are not many at all that I could find. STAT at VPF created the two I put into the array. When the script encounters these files during processing ffmpeg will make a 30 second capture, rotate, and save as an swf file. I originally pursued this solution hoping that the text on the instruction card images would be more legible than what VP tends to render. But I have a standard width table and a 39" screen. It's still a pretty small area, so I don't think it looks much better or clearer than what VP was already doing. But since any sort of video or image content can be displayed, it becomes another creative platform for people to do interesting mods. I hope to see more animated cards or custom backgrounds for the mirrored DMD/B2S: This would be possible with some tweaking to the main script: https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/watch-that-dmd#post-1043384 https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/dmd-extender/page/2#post-754826 Cheers!

Hey All, I'm getting a 100% crash when viewing instruction cards in PinballX only when I'm using a 4k res (3840x2160) on my main TV display. The secondary monitor is running 1080p (1920x1080). When I run my main display in 1080 res the instructions work fine, no issues. Also, once in 4k mode the first instruction card will show, then if I scroll through games, then come back to the same game's instruction card it will crash out. I've attached my log, but It's not an OOM issue, seems to be parameter when passing into System.Drawing.Bitmap..ctor(Int32 width, Int32 height, PixelFormat format). Anyone else run into this issue? Thanks! log.txt

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

Pro Pinball: The Web instruction cards in Flash format are now on the FTP under Media/Instruction Cards/Pro Pinball The Web. These were converted from the manual for the old PC version. Use with mfuegemann's fine VP version that was allowed by the Pro Pinball team: http://www.vpforums.org/index.php?app=downloads&showfile=11564 Source for manual: http://www.classic-gaming.net/file/download/9328/

Hi, I converted all of the Stern Pinball playfield shot maps for available tables to Flash for use as instruction cards. Most text and images were traced to vectors so that they will look great scaled up on a cab. I extracted the raw bitmaps from Stern's published pdf documents. The Potrace program integrated in Inkscape did a nice job converting the playfield bitmaps to vectors. Then text and vector images were reassembled in Illustrator and exported to Flash. They are on the FTP in the Other Uploads/Carny/SternShotMaps folder Also, I have still been converting and updating factory instruction cards as I add tables to my cab. They are located in Other Uploads/Carny/Z20160604 Enjoy!

Hi, as part of the effort of generating media for my miniDMD and flash player project I went through my collection and recaptured many of the factory stock instruction cards. The sources are primarily Inkochnito's reproductions and Stern Pinball. Some I pulled from the VP table images. Some are photos that I did my best to correct. They are not perfect because I don't have the proper Adobe tools to vectorize and publish to flash, but they still are nice improvements to what I had collected from various HP media packs at VPF and elsewhere. Where we were missing a card I added ones to to the Media\Instruction Cards folder on the FTP. Where we already had a card, I did not want to overwrite what was there so I have put the rest in an Instruction Cards folder in my Other Uploads\Carny folder. If an admin wants to take a look and move them under the Media folder then that would be good. But otherwise, they are there in my folder. I'll add some more periodically as I add more tables to my cab.

Hi, I'm revisiting this old project for a miniDMD window and flash slideshow viewer on the apron: I generated a bunch of media last year for the project vectorizing cards from PDF-based sources, cropping to the correct factory size, etc. Sadly, I found after generating all this media that that most were not viewable in PinballX. Most factory cards are black text on white background. And these display as all black in PinballX. They look good when opening in a browser or using whatever specific Flash ActiveX component that AutoHotkey taps into. I'm guessing that's the Flash Player plug-in that you may install into IE or perhaps comes with Windows 10. I noticed that PinballX installs Flash.ocx and I was wondering if a different version may work to display these cards. Granted, if I try to re-open or place any of these files in Adobe Illustrator it tells me that the file is in an unknown format and cannot be opened. The image looks corrupted if I try to extract images using swftools. It's bad since I'm using Illustrator to export into swf format in the first place. And it will not read in what it is writing out. Similar deal with Office Libre. Frustrating. All the media is up on the FTP in the folder references in the link above. It's not a total waste of time if it turns out that there is no good solution. I can write a script to display in a flash viewer upscaled to 4K and capture it to png and they will look fantastic. However, my backglass is 16:9. Because PinballX scales png images, those captures will not look quite right if the user is running something different like 16:10 or 5:4. The script can be modified and the collection re-captured but it would be easier if the swf files could be viewed directly. Thanks.

I've downloaded from the FTP the set of ShoryukinToTheChin table guides that open6l converted to swf, but I'm missing some instructions for some of the newer releases. Inspired by this topic: http://www.gameex.info/forums/topic/14212-format-instructions-swf/#entry118960 I captured the table guide for Pinball FX2 - The Walking Dead to make a set of animated instruction cards in swf format. Instead of making one long video, I edited my capture down to separate clips for each table feature. That way I can bump up the quality. I've just done the one table for now to see if I want to continue doing this. I uploaded to the FTP in the "Other Uploads" section. I'm also making it available here for a little while: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/45430846/Walking%20Dead%2C%20The.zip

I copied in some custom cards for display under the Instructions menu item. Don't know if it is a bug or not but if , for example, I have: "Attack from Mars (Bally 1995).swf" "Attack from Mars (Bally 1995).png 1" "Attack from Mars (Bally 1995).png 2" then PinballX will not scroll from the swf to the next file.