[APP] NukeLauncher - NukePA for (The Pinball Arcade)

[mpad]

Just set a nonexistent button to the left trigger. Like button 30 or sth. That did it for me.

The flipper and magna save buttons are keyboard inputs remapped with xpadder (or antimicro).

So for me only a combination of two worlds works.

[Carny_Priest]

Gotcha. Thanks for the tip. I use ahk scripts extensively with Pinballx. I can just map joystick button presses to key presses in a script.

[Mikeww1]

Hi Jeff , Hi everybody,

I am ready to start with nukelauncher and have installed it following the instructions.

Currently I am using a script to lauch PA from the desktop that works for me.

Before starting PA I start : C:\Program Files\Steam\JoyToKey_en\JoyToKey.exe

Then I use irotate with the following command:

run, "%dcworkdir%%dcexe%" %dcparamportrait%

where the parameters are:

dcworkdir = %ProgFiles%\iRotate\
dcparamlandscape = /rotate=0
dcparamportrait = /rotate=90
dcexe = iRotate.exe

--------------------------------------------------------

Now on Nuke in order to start joy2key I used the parameter line in the ini file.

This is my ini file:

NukePA.ini

I tested it on the command prompt trying to start "Black Knight" as recommended in the documentation.

The first time I called it I received a notification that the automatch feature could identify 54 tables.

I have used the xml for all tables from Jeff as I have bought all 4 seasons Pro.

Nothing more happened.

The second time Joy2key was started and steam was started. The screen was not rotated and I think therefore PA did not start. I saw the Nukelauncher icon in the tray.

I killed steam,joy2key and Nukelauncher and tried id again - same result.

That leads to the following questions:

1. Why does the irotate command from Nuke not work ?

2. If there is no solution for 1. I could pack the joy2key and the my irotate command in a separate script and start it on launch.

3. If we get irotate to work in Nuke how do I terminate joy2key at exit ?

4. I am using the pro menu on all tables to change them to 5 ball play.

Although changes you do in the pro menu get saved you have to activate the pro feature again in the menu on each table you want to play once you select it.

That leads to the following question :

Would it be possible to add another selectable feature into Nukelauncher that would allow to activate the pro menu after selecting the table. The necessary keyboard input would be the following:

After selecting a Table - before you have to press enter to launch the table you have to use these keys:

right

enter

up

enter

enter

enter

Bkspace

Bkspace

left

The you are back on the menu and need just one enter to start the table.

Thanks for helping me get it running.

Michael

[time299]

Hey Michael

Lets focus on getting everything working first.

Can you post or email me your files PinballX.ini, Pinball Arcade.XML, and NukePA.ini. So we can get a full picture of your setup and what you are loading and when.

​It sounds like you are running another script to try to rotate your screen and then setting NukePA to rotate you screen again.

If you have iRotate installed then all you need to do is have the correct orentain set in the NukePA.ini and eveything will work. If you are loading some ahk or script to run ( run, "%dcworkdir%%dcexe%" %dcparamportrait% ) then you are sooting your self in the foot.

See documentation for more help.

http://www.nukelauncher.com/item.asp?iid=33#Rotate

Next you mentioned joy2key this is something you should be running when you launch PinballX not when you launch a specific table using NUkePA the "LaunchBefore" and "LaunchAfter" are not for loading joy2key. They are for launching things like LEDBlinky or some other script that some people may want to load a profile and then load a different profile when they exit. Anyway remove that and just focus on getting the correct table loading, then if you want to try adding them back later you can.

Hope this helps and post those files so we can take a look.

Thanks,

Jeff

[Mikeww1]

Hi Jeff,

thank you for your reply.

In my tests I was of course only using Nukelauncher. I did no mix with my current script !

I included the lines only to show that irotate is currently working with my old script.

I use joy2key to map my joystick buttons to keyboard and I want to continue using it.

I need that only for PA but I could use the pinballx facility to launch and stop programs - so we can leave that out for now.

I removed joy2key from NukePA.ini and tried it again with the command line, but again the screen rotation does not work.

As I was using a 90° turn with irotate on my old script I used 90 as parameter in the ini file.

Here are my other files:

NukePA.iniPinball Arcade.xmlPinballX.ini

Thanks for your help.

[time299]

Michael

One thing looks odd, but may be nothing. I have never seen steam install to "C:\Program Files\Steam" the usual place is "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\" but it may just be a custom install location and nothing to worry about as long as your files are all in that location. What OS are you running?

Everything else looks good as far as I can see on your NukePA setup.

Let's check your iRotate setup

What happens if (from the desktop with nothing else running - just windows) you press

Ctrl + Alt and your Left arrow keys? Or Ctrl + Alt and your Up arrow?

More info on the documentation page Here

Your screen should rotate, does it?

Is iRotate installed on your system and running in the system tray? The reference in your old script seems to be calling it from the command line. But for nukelauncher to access it, it needs to be installed and mapped to the following:

Ctrl+Alt+UP = 0

Ctrl+Alt+Left = 90
Ctrl+Alt+Down = 180
Ctrl+Alt+Right = 270

We did this so that it would work consistently for iRotate / Display Changer / Video Driver support

Try that stuff and report your results please,

Jeff

[Mikeww1]

Hi Jeff,

I am running Windows 8.1 32bit. That explains why there is no (x86) folder.

Yes I just call irotate from the comamnd line and have it usually not running in the tray.

It was unclear to me that I have to set it up that way. I will do that and report back.

Michael

[nicco84]

hi guys a little problem.

running w 8.1 64 pro

i have no steam and i have pinball arcade dir in program files (x86) dir

nukepa.exe and nukepa.ini in C:\Program Files (x86)\Pinball Arcade dir

when i push play inside pinballx it says message "bad or missing command line parameter...."

there are my ini.

could help me?

thanks

EDIT: sorry guys i forgive "[TABLEFILE]" under parameters of pinballx ini

Now it's ok but pinball arcade doesn't want work with monitor rotating per 90 degrees. it doesn't work out of pinballx...

it appear white screen and i must kill app with task manager

i have a geforce 750 2 gb, i5

my 3 screens are connected to gf 750 (playfield and BG with hdmi and dmd (lcd 16") with vga). no problem with VP or FP.

any ideas?

PinballX.ini

NukePA.ini

[Mikeww1]

Hi Jeff,

I could solve some issues but not all. I had no irotate installed. After installing it the screen rotation works in principle.

I changed the the ini file to 270° as in my pinnballx setup.

I could then successfully launch Black knight from the command line. On exit the screen was rotated in the wrong orientation.

The normal position of my screen is 180° and not 0° It looks like Nukepa defaults to 0° on exit.

Then I tried it from PinballX. First I got a Windows error message that went away after unblocking Nukepa.exe.

But it still does not launch. The screen is rotated but then it stays black. In the windows log there is an error entry.

I attach a picture of the log entry. Sorry its in german, but it might help to idetify the issue.

I did a test and launched my old ahk script exe from pinballx. That worked without any problem.

I run pinballx as administrator as well as nukepa. At the moment I am out of ideas. Could be Windows 8.1 specific

I attach the slightly changed nuke.ini. The rest of the files have not changed.

edit:

I changed the piballarcade.exe to run as administrator as well. Then I stopped steam and tried it again.

Now PA was starting but no keys were sent to the app. Pressing esc gets you back to the main screen with PA and PinnbalX running in the background.

Nukelauncher is stopping when I press esc , the screen stays at portrait mode.

That hack is not consistent even for launching PA. After a reboot PA does not launch anymore and I get the same error in the log.

Just for reference: These are the lines from my working script to launch PA

Run, "%SteamDirPath%\Steam.exe" -applaunch 238260
Process, wait, PinballArcade.exe
process, WaitClose, PinballArcade.exe

NukePA.ini

[Mikeww1]

mpad I really have to thank you very much !!! you solved the problem.

I did read the whole thread some weeks ago and today I reread it again.

And there I found the solution that mpad described.

I set pinballx to windowed fullscren and sudenly it works like a charm.

@Jeff

You should add the recommandation to run pinballx in windowed fullscreen to your great instructions.

Maybe this problem only occures on Windows 8.1 or only on german Windows 8.1 but this resolves the problem.

For my setup, when I exit back to pinballx the screen is 180° in the wrong direction.

The menu is upside down. I have to press CTR-ALT-DOWN to get the pinbally menu in the right direction.

As I wrote in a former post I presume that the NukePA thinks that the normal screen setup must be landscape with the windows bottom line to the right if you stand in front of the cab. If you play on a PC than this will be true in most cases but with my cab the bottom line is to the left.

A solution would be that you add another parameter and make the endposition also configurable.

Then I would like to ask if you could also add the possibility to activate the pro setup as I have it described in my first post in this thread. I know that in season 1 there are tables that dont have a pro menu.

If you dont want to get deeper into that then it would be sufficient if you add a parameter that would allow to call a user ahk script after you finished the table selection.

Anyway I want to thank you for the greta program you created and I will donate.

[time299]

Hey Mikeww1

Glad you got it working.

That's a good suggestion, I will add a note to the documentation in the next few days and thanks for the donation.

As a work around you could remap your iRotate to have the key bindings match your setup. Specifically in iRotate change the CTR-ALT-DOWN to CTR-ALT-UP and CTR-ALT-UP to CTR-ALT-DOWN this should correct your screen rotation issue.

As for the pro menu I am looking into that, but as timing is so flaky with Pinball Arcade. My testing has proven inconstant results when trying to navigating all of the extra screen changes to do the pro menu options you describe.

I already have a feature for people who want to manually start the actual table play. To use this feature change the AutoStart = true to AutoStart = false in your NukePA.ini. That should launch and navigate to the table start screen and leave you at the screen where you can press enter to start the table or navigate to the pro menu and change the options you want and then launch the table. Also make sure BlockInput = false or you want be able to do any navigation.

I hope that helps,

Jeff

[time299]

Nicco84

You way want to try the same thing Mikeww1 did and set PinballX to windowed full screen.

It may be a windows 8.1 Requirement / Limitation.

Jeff

[nicco84]

Hey Jeff and mikeww1, when I have time I will try.

Thanks men

[nicco84]

Thanks to Jeff and mike, the problem was w8.1 and windowed full screen mode.

Now it works but with problem:

If I select a table through Pinballx wheel it opens TPA correctly push ok to open every menu (auto start true in nukePA.ini) but in TPA table wheel it selects attack from Mars (because it is the first table), open it and also shot the first ball ... Like the ahk always says to push enter... I think a video could explain better

My nukePA.ini is in the post #208

Thanks guys

[mace]

Hmm, looking at your video I noticed that you have an extra screen advertising The Addams Family, that was posted up back last Halloween so I'm guessing that the script that sends the key commands is missing one key press as that screen will need an {enter} to clear, in other words that screen is knocking out the key sequence. You may be able to see this better if you start NukePA from an elevate Dos prompt with the command: NukePA.exe "Table name"

Jeff may be able to comment if it's possible to add a small .ahk script like:

sleep 14000

send {enter}

If this was compiled to enter.exe and placed in the [Launch] section of NukePA.ini like this

[Launch]

LaunchBefore = enter.exe

LaunchAfter

And the other NukePA.ini timings were left as default it may give you the extra enter you need one second prior to the normal NukePA.exe script taking over.

....or we ask Jeff if it's possible to do this a little more elegantly (I'm no expert in these things)

[nicco84]

Thanks lurker!

Yes i understood in the ahk was something wrong but it wasn't possible only for me.

Yes maybe Jeff could add this few strings in ahk and then recompile in exe for us, if could be possible

Thanks lurker and anticipate toJeff

[mace]

I think that this may fix it for you, open the Pinball Arcade.xml file in the PinballX/Database/Pinball Arcade folder (or whatever yours is named) and add the following line as the last line of every entry:

<SendKeysOnStart>{Sleep 8000}{Enter}</SendKeysOnStart>

Thanks to Tom for adding the ability to use VB SendKeys this will give the extra 'Enter' keypress needed, note you may have to increase the 8000 to 10000 or 12000 and so on depending on the speed of your system. As Jeff indicated though please leave the NukePA.ini timings at stock until its all working, when it is you can drop the initial delay time there (15000) to (2000) and speed things up considerably.

[Talantyyr]

thank you for nukelauncher! I'm currently trying to set it up for pinball arcade, but i have some issues...

i renamed PinballArcade11.exe to PinballArcade.exe (backuped the dx9 exe first). On first start, Nuke launcher told me it found ~50 tables. I used your xml file from the website so that seems ok, then i adjusted the path to the xml in the config file.

When i want to start a table, e.g. NukePA "Funhouse" Pinball arcade starts, it presses enter a few times until the table selection dialog, then it doesn't do anything for a while and stays at the first element (Addams Family) and then presses enter again. (it doesn't even navigate to a wrong table, so that faq entry on your site doesn't apply). Then it stays at the "START" screen, where i can press enter manually to start the table. (Config entry has set autostarttable to 1)

When i press ESCAPE nothing happens.

I left all the config entries at default, except screen rotation. Strange thing is, with DX9 exe it doesn't start Pinball Arcade at all after rotating the screen. It does when screenrotation is set to 0.

All compatibility options set to "Run as admistrator", i'm running Win7 on my cab.

Btw, please add a config entry for the PBA executable, so DX11 can be chosen instead of renaming the files.

Edit: Ok, i got it fully working with DX9 executable, but not with DX11. Maybe you have to do some adjustments for DX11 exe?

[mpad]

Hey and welcome over here.

Seems you already solved it yourself, only thing I can say is the whole thing is very delicate to the timings. And the bad thing is that TPA is very inconsistent about that. The UI is very poorly done I guess. One session is fine, the other one everything takes a few milliseconds more or less. That's why nukelauncher has trouble to find the right table...

All I'm saying is that given dx11 performance is different from dx9 you may need slightly or significantly different timings, depending on your system.

[Talantyyr]

i wouldn't call that "solved", it's working with DX9 version, but it's not sending any keys but "enter" to the dx11 version. not even ESCAPE button is working here. So far i'll stick with DX9, but i hope this will be upgraded for DX11 soon, as the tables look much better!

[mpad]

Hmm... There was someone complaining over at Pinballarcadefans his controller / keyboard not working in dx11. Maybe you have that same problem and it's not nukelauncher related.

Dunno if there was a fix or something...

[Talantyyr]

Interesting... Hmm, not sure if that's related as my keyboard works fine, but now that you mention it, i've noticed that i wasn't able to re-map the keys in the settings. only mouse buttons were accepted. I'm not using any "controller" for my cab buttons yet, just keyboard attached. though everything worked fine and i could

Guess i'll try it on another pc today. And i'll try if the key-remapping works on DX9 version (cause nuke launcher works there).

Nevertheless, it'd be a great addition to choose which version (dx9 oder dx11) to launch with Nukelauncher

[mace]

Agree, I have the same issue - no keys sent to DX11.

Additionally since I've just had the v139.7 update I've also struggled with the DX9 version on my cab (Win7x64/i5-4570/8Gb/GTX670) which now will only 'see' the key sends if Pinball Arcade is set to run in Full Screen Windowed mode which previously only affected my Win8 build.

It would also be good if anyone knows how to get Red & Ted's Road Show selecting, at present no matter how I name it in the xml/nukepa.ini it will not select and sits firmly on Addams - this does not affect Xenon which selects perfectly, I'm guessing it's not supported yet

[mpad]

It is always the same logic, so it should work. I guess you misspelled something. Or the name of the actual table file is strange. Maybe try to look into the table folder

[mace]

Yep spot on, should have been 'Roadshow' no space - my bad :-)