No DMD video on machine boot up

[VPcabs]

Hi Folks. Brad with VPcabs here. We are very excited to be a new part of the PinballX family!! Tom recommended that I chime in with a couple issues so the brain trust here can lend a hand. Here's the first one.

When I boot our machines from off we do not get a DMD video in PinballX. If I do a restart it works perfectly fine. We run a 2 card setup with the playfield on the HDMI of a GTX 760, the backglass on the HDMI of a 610 and the color LED DMD on the VGA of the 610.

Any ideas or help would be greatly appreciated!!

[Carny_Priest]

Hi, I have a VPCabs build circa 2013. It had a two card setup with a GTX 660 and a GT 610. I have found no performance improvement at all in "offloading a stream" to the 610. I run all three screens off of the GTX 660. I don't OC. I take advantage of NVidia's DSR technology to downsample from 4k to 1920x1080. DSR works with VP (VP 991, physmod, and VP10beta, FP, TPA (DX9 and DX11), PFX2, and Unit3D beta. I completely removed the 610 and haven't looked back.

By the way, there is no other option with Unit3d but to connect BG to the high performance card to be able to move the translite to the BG screen. Connecting the BG to the 610 is a non-starter.

Use the Shark007 codec pack linked on the PBX home page. I just tested last night an updated Shark007 codec pack and experienced the issue you have with DMD video not playing as well as table and BG videos freezing. I have also tested the internal Win7 codec, and that did not work well for me at all. The codec pack recommended for use on the home page works beautifully for me.

[VPcabs]

Thank you^^^ I'll have a go at that. We have been flirting with the idea of a single video card so maybe I'll start messing with that as well.

[arcadegeek23]

I have one of VPCabs machine and I see this behavior. I have installed the Shark007 codecs etc but no change. It appears to be an issue on the order of the three monitors as they are powered on after a cold start. After Windows resets the playfield display to main it holds on a warm reboot and then when PinballX is started the DMD display works. On a cold boot the backglass monitor is where the initial desktop shows and it flips on the playfield monitor is fully on. It appears to be an issue with they way PinballX looks at the three monitors. I tested swapping the monitor numbers in the Pinballx and then I didn't get the backglass but I get the DMD display so it does have to do with the changing of the primary display after windows starts. The only way all three display correctly in this three monitor setup if you do a warm reboot.

[Carny_Priest]

You might try swapping around the cable connections to the card. I have playfield on HDMI, BG on the DVI-I port, and DMD on the DVI-D port. I have the primary display as the BG on boot because that's where I want it. It's easier for me to maintain the machine looking at the backglass rather than the playfield.

I use Display Changer II (dc2.exe), a feature rich version of rotate.exe, and set up different profiles to change the primary display to playfield when starting PBX and starting different systems within PBX. I use various display profiles for each system (Ex. 4K DSR downsampling for PBX, portrait mode for TPA, etc.). I have scripts set up for each system, but if you otherwise don't have many customizations, you can simply get into the Settings Wizard and set up PBX's built in launchers to change your display profile.

Use the Shark007 codec package linked to on the PinballX front page. Updated packages directly from Shark007.net did not work for me.

[arcadegeek23]

Good news to report. Thanks for the tip on the Display Changer II. I changed the configuration to now use the BG by default and then switch to the playfield when starting Pinballx and then back to the BG when exiting. That only didn't fix the issue of the DMD not displaying correctly on first maching power-on but I did notice that the DMD was behind the playfield. I changed the setting in PinballX to be on Display #2 which is the orginal number when the maching detects the display and it now works from a cold boot. Success!

Brad let me know if you want my .ini file etc if it will help with default setups.

Machine is awesome!