[RESOLVED] Visual Pinball Help

[hansolo77]

Been a while since I installed Visual Pinball/VPinMAME. Need a little hand holding.

I recall there was a program we had developed that automates the whole process of launching VP and pressing the F5 key to play the loaded table. I don't remember what it was called though, or how to go about setting it up, so I need a little help with that.

Also, when using VPinMAME for tables with ROMs, there is a little burb box that opens up saying it needs to know if you have permission, yadda yadda, is there a way to turn that off, or to automate clicking YES?

Lastly, I think my physics are off and I don't know how to fix it. My balls all seem to go to the right side of the table really quick, like the table isn't level. How do I fix that?

Thanks guys!

[nullPointer]

Been a while since I installed Visual Pinball/VPinMAME. Need a little hand holding.

I recall there was a program we had developed that automates the whole process of launching VP and pressing the F5 key to play the loaded table. I don't remember what it was called though, or how to go about setting it up, so I need a little help with that.

Also, when using VPinMAME for tables with ROMs, there is a little burb box that opens up saying it needs to know if you have permission, yadda yadda, is there a way to turn that off, or to automate clicking YES?

Hi Han,

I haven't run VisualPinball/PinMAME for quite a while (i.e. I don't run it on my current rig, but have run it in the past), so I don't know if I can help with the troubleshooting component of your query.

However, I do plan on getting VP going on my machine again, and as such have been following this thread with great interest regarding a wrapper for VP. Howard Casto typically puts out high quality software, and generally won't release anything unless he feels it's up to his standard. Given its date of release, I can practically guarantee that this is the most current up-to-date VP wrapper out there.

If you want to jump right to the release itself, it can be found here (or more specifically here).

Again though I haven't tried it out yet. If you decide to give it a shot, it would be great to hear how it works out for you.

[Adultery]

Haven't tried Castro's wrapper but agree with NullPointer on the quality of his work. I use Tempest's launcher though and it works great.

[hansolo77]

I actually downloaded it and played around with it for while. It's actually pretty nice. I had some trouble with it finding the actual VPinball.exe file, because it wouldn't save what I typed in. So I just renamed my file to match what the launcher was looking for. It seems to work pretty well. He's also gone through great lenths to build in a sort of menu system to access various additional features of Visual Pinball whilst still in the middle of a game (like pressing [TAB] in MAME to bring up a menu). The only downside to this menu that I can see, is that I can't NAVIGATE in it. I figured out that you use the flippers for left and right (or up and down) and the START key (button #1) for enter, but once I got into the 2nd menu, I was stuck on the first option, just toggling different available options for it with no way to go BACK. I'm going to send him a quick message/forum post and see whats up.

I'm having a really tough time with my games though. I'm not even to the point of launching through GameEx, or even caring that much about a launcher. I'm really getting bugged by this apparent un-level-ness. I launch a ball, and it goes straight for the right side and hugs the walls right to the bottom hole. Some are more drastic/aparent than others. But it's really bad when you try to launch the ball on a table that has a ramp going up across the playfield over to the top left. There's just not enough power in the plunger to overcome the angle/tilt of the table to even make it across the ramp.

Also, I've started to notice a bunch of my tables are coming up crashing the program. I don't even get to the point where I can start to play the table. It just crashes Visual Pinball while loading the table. It doesn't give me any kind of debugger/dialog box, or something saying whats crashed. It just says something generic like "Visual Pinball has stopped Responding". Clicking ok or cancel just closes it down completely. I did have one table actually load up but not be able to play, giving me a syntax error on a specific line number of the 'code'. But aside from that, this is very troublesome. I love Pinball, and really want to get back into playing some of these great tables. I just don't remember it being so finicky about level/balance and crashing on a lot of the tables.

[Adultery]

You sure you're using tables for your specific version?

[nullPointer]

Hmm . . . I seem to remember a lot of issues if the version of VisualPinball you’re running doesn’t match the table version. Much like MAME I suppose, except moreso since many tables only exist for a single version of VP. Like I said I haven’t used it for a while, but I remember that factor alone being a huge headache. I’m sure you’ve probably verified table version vs. software version, but if not it would probably be worth looking into.

Edit: Adultery beat me to the punch . . . Damn my verbosity!

Edited April 4, 2012 by Adultery
LOL! :)

[hansolo77]

Well, without going into detail on HOW or WHERE, I got the Visual Pinball 9 clean set.

Then I went to the vpforums and downloaded the setup guide (http://www.vpforums....etail&f_id=4070) which had me download the latest version of VPinball (9.0.2) a long with all the extra bits like samples, fonts, vbs scripts, etc.

So anyway, I would assume VPinball 9.0.2 along with Version 9 of the tables would be all I needed. Inside that Version 9 table torrent included all those sub folders like Original, Recreated, PinMame Recreated, etc. Should be working. And most of the tables I've loaded do LOAD and launch, they just have this weird leveling issue.

Here's the post I made on the vpforums about these issues: http://www.vpforums....showtopic=18833

[Adultery]

You got me on that one Han. I ue a similar setup and I'm not seeing the issues you are with physics. What's one of the tables you're seeing it real bad on?

[Draco1962]

Maybe if you put a book or some shims under the right side of your PC the balls will hang to the left....

[Adultery]

ROFL!

/insert rim shot... "But seriously folks..."

[rockyrocket]

Any chance of a video of your offcenter behavior?, never heard of anything like it.

Sounds like desktop and full screen tables are mixed up somehow?.

Also if you launch toms vpauto app with vp then it will kill the nag screens.

[hansolo77]

I'll have to go back to find out which ones were doing it. I know there was one that was extremly bad I couldn't even play it. As for the crashing, I think I might have figured it out but I need to run some tests... The guys over at the vpforums were saying it sounded like my tables/roms didn't match my version of VPinball, much like you guys suggested. I said I had 9.0.2, and they asked if it was a typo because the latest version is actually 9.1.2. I doublechecked, and sure enough it had installed 9.0.2, not 9.1.2. So I just got done reinstalling it, and will test here shortly.

As for the unbalance issue, it may have cleared itself up on its own, or it might have just been the few tables I had initially tried. I played a few more tables yesterday, and they all seemed fine. So I'll report back.

[rockyrocket]

Coolio, no need to reinstall though, just replace the exe.

[hansolo77]

Well I just did full blown reinstall, seems to have fixed all my crashing. WOO HOOO!! Also, I don't seem to have that annoying balance issue either. So for future reference, here's what had happened....

I installed VP using a program I downloaded from the vpforums website. They have a tab there listed as "Getting Started" and in there is a program called VP Installer. This is basically an automated installer that includes VP, VPinMAME, and all the required samples, scripts, and nvrams all ready to go in one neat package. The problem with this though is that the program is out of date. It installs version 9.0.2 of Visual Pinball and version 2.3 of VPinMAME. The latests are 9.1.2 for VP and 2.4 for VPM. So when I tried to play tables from the torrents, they were NEWER than the installer had used, thus crashing happened. To save yourself heartache, just download the full 9.1.2 installer and 2.4 installer from vpforums and forego the automated VP Installer app. As a side note though, you DO need to then download and put the samples/scripts/fonts/nvrams where they're supposed to go.

Also, the wrapper/loader/menu program Castro created works GREAT with GameEx. You never see the desktop, and instead see a very nice LOADING screen. I also figured out how the in game menu [ie; MAME TAB] works. If it's BLUE, you can navigate to different menu items; if it's ORANGE, you're locked on that menu item setting and are switching it between the available options.

Now onto Future Pinball!

[rockyrocket]

cool, glad it worked out.

To be fair though the install guide does say that it is not recommended to use the installer as it installs old versions that need manual updating.

[steveg64]

Hi hansolo77,

How did you configure the gameex setup so as to use Howard Castro's wrapper to launch Visual Pinball?

[hansolo77]

All you need to do is configure GameEx to find the tables as part of ROMPATH, set your rom filter to *.vpt, then your command line is

vp-launch6.exe "[ROMPATH]\[ROMFILE]"

He already takes care of automatically launching the table once it's loaded into VP, and bypassing the disclaimer/title screen for PinMAME. The escape key then closes everything out which takes you back to GameEx.

I'm also using a gamepad. I created a joy2key profile, and created a shortcut that launches joy2key for that profile. Then I have my launch before set to:

start "" "M:\Joy2Key\Joy2Key Pinball.lnk"

and then launch after to close it:

taskkill.exe /F /IM JoyToKey.exe

[steveg64]

Thanks hansolo77.

Edited August 15, 2012 by Draco1962
This thread is marked as Resolved and is now closed. If the problem re-occurs, please start a new thread.