[GUIDE] How to ask for Help

[zeenon]

Welcome to the PinballX forums!

If you were sent to this page, you are probably fairly new to PinballX, and have asked for help. Please do not be insulted that we referred you to this page, we are happy to help in any way that we can, but we need you to know a few things first, to help us serve you better.

We cannot stress this enough, the more information you give us the faster we can pinpoint the issue you are having. Starting a thread that says PinballX doesnt start? HELP!!!! really doesnt give us a whole lot to go on. If you take the time to write a clear and concise post on the problem, more people will take the time to read it and help.

Searching the forums and viewing the PinballX documentation will usually solve 90% of the problems people experience with a new setup.

Documentation: http://www.gameex.info/forums/topic/13736-pinballx-documentation/
PinballX Forums: http://www.gameex.info/forums/forum/30-pinballx/

A few guidelines that will make our job easier:

1. If you have an issue following an update, please start a new thread and do not respond in the NEWS thread announcing the update. If the issue you are experiencing appears that it may be a result of a recent update, indicate the PinballX version in the Topic Title along with the issue encountered.

2. If your issue has been resolved (with assistance of a mod or admin or you just figured it out for yourself), you can edit the topic title if you are the creator and note [RESOLVED] at the beginning of the title. If you are uncertain how to do this, we can do it for you. Also, if you figured it out for yourself a brief summary of how you did so is also appreciated. By doing so, you may be helping the next person that comes behind you, or maybe even identify a bug if the solution is something that can be fixed with a future update.

3. If you have a Feature Request, please post it in the appropriate thread under the Pinned and Hot Topics forum!

4. If the issue or information you are sharing is not directly related to PinballX functionality, please utilize the Social Club forum.

Help us help you:
The first thing we will need to know, is do you have your emulator (Visual Pinball, Future Pinball, Pinball FX2, Pinball Arcade, etc) working outside of PinballX. By this I mean that you can open the emulator in Windows, and you can select/run a game. If not, we will still try to help, but please take a few minutes to look around on the emulators homepage to see if they have a FAQ (Frequently Asked Question) section, or other information to help you.

If you have your emulator working outside of PinballX, but don't know how to set it up in PinballX, you may want to take a look at the PinballX Documentation at: http://www.gameex.info/forums/topic/13736-pinballx-documentation/
 

5. Attach Your PinballX.ini

If you are having a problem with starting a emulator, image issues or some other "built-in" feature of PinballX, we may want to take a look at your PinballX.ini, which can be found in this folder: X:\PinballX\Config\ 

6. Attach your Log.txt

If PinballX "crashes" or other errors occur, there is an error log that may help you find out why. To view it, Go to: X:\PinballX\Log\

7. If having an issue with a specific emulator\simulator, please note the system and version and attach a copy of the system's .xml file (i.e. Pinball FX3.xml for Pinball FX3 launch or other issues).

Updated PinballX v1.06 documentation also attached.

PinballX_S2F_Documentation rev 1.06.docx.zip

PinballX_S2F_Documentation rev 1.06.pdf