Configure Future Pinball to keep tables in sub folders.

[Lardzor]

* Edit: It turns out this is a non-issue as pointed out by 'hansolo77' in his comment. I'll see if I can't have this misguided post removed. *

I was trying to set up Future Pinball with GameEx. I have all of my tables in sub folders because sometimes tables have associated files with names that conflict with other tables.

The problem is that when I configure Future Pinball's ROM path to the root path of all my tables (\Future Pinball\Tables), It doesn't see the sub folders. I also noticed that if I configure the ROM Path to a specific table sub folder, it sees all the files and not just the main .fpt table file.

I discovered I could keep my all my tables in their sub folders and not show any of the extra associated files with just a little bit of work.

First, I put every table and its' associated files into its' own private folder. The folder name was the same as the main table file except I changed the extension from "fpt" to just ".fp" at the end. For example, I put the "Jurassic Park ULTRA 1.05.fpt" table and all of it's associated files into a folder named "\Future Pinball\Tables\Jurassic Park ULTRA 1.05.fp" (note the ".fp" at the end)

Now my "\Future Pinball\Tables" folder has nothing but more folders in it, and all the folders ended with ".fp" and they all had only the files needed for their specific tables.

Next I created empty (zero byte) dummy ROM files in the "\future pool\Tables" folder for all the tables (I just made empty text files and renamed them). I named the dummy files the same name as the main table files exept this time, I change the ".fpt" extension to just ".f" on the end. This is just a dummy ROM file for GameEx to see when it looks in the Tables folder since it won't see any of the sub folders.

Now all I just need to configure GameEx to take advantage of my handywork.

I used GameEx's Setup Wizard and went to Emulator Setup and selected "[Pinball] Future Pinball" to configure it's settings.

I made sure the 'ROM Path' was set to my Future Pinball's tables folder. (for me it was "E:\Program Files\GAMES\Future Pinball\Tables")

Next I needed to edit the 'Command Line' field.

It has a default setting of:

"Future Pinball.exe" /open "[ROMPATH]\[ROMFILE]" /play /exit

We need to edit this a bit since our table files are in subfolders. But since the subfolders are all named the same as our dummy ROM files except with the an extra "p" at the end, we are going to add "[ROMFILE]p\" to this field. We also need to add "pt" to the end of the existing "[ROMFILE]" since our dummy files only have an extension of ".f" and not ".fpt". The finished 'Command Line' field should look like this:

"Future Pinball.exe" /open "[ROMPATH]\[ROMFILE]p\[ROMFILE]pt" /play /exit

You should be done. Exit the Setup Wizard.

Now when you run GameEx, it should list all of your dummy files as selectable tables, and will look for the associated fpt file in folders with the fp extesion.

I hope this may help anyone else struggling with Future Pinball's setup.

Regards,

Lardzor

Edited August 1, 2013 by Lardzor

[nullPointer]

Thanks a lot for sharing your solution Lardzor! I'm sure this will be of assistance to our Future Pinball users.

[hansolo77]

Why didn't you just use the option "Scan Sub Folders" under the Advanced Emulator Setup page? Set your Rom Filter to *.fpt and just point it to the /Tables path. With "Scan Sub Folders" it will look in any folders under /Tables for any files ending in *.fpt. Your option works too I suppose, but that's a lot of extra work than is needed I think.