Prevent PinballX from resizing VPX DMD

[byancey]

With no small effort I have finally manged to integrate Pinball FX2, Pro-Pinball (Timeshock), and Future Pinball into PinballX.  This is a 3 monitor setup, where the 3rd "DMD" monitor is masked into a DMD space, with a smaller "Logo" space beneath it.  I've just been making custom DMD videos or images that incorporate both the DMD and the logo into the correct locations and set hidedmd to false for my games.  When a game launches, the in-game DMD is overlayed above the DMD video and the logo remains visible playing beneath it while the game is running.  This was working great until I tried introducing Visual Pinball X into my system.  I got everything up and running in the correct locations using the VPX editor to launch the games, and then figured it would be a simple matter to drop the games into PinballX.  To my surprise, every time I launch a VPX table from PinballX, it completely resizes my DMD to full screen, stretching and distorting it in the process.  

I finally determined that when PinballX launches a VPX table, it grabs the DMD size settings from the PinballX configuration and uses that to resize the VPX DMD.  This value is set to 1366x768 to accommodate my custom DMD videos with logos beneath them.  I'm not sure why it does this for VPX rather than just letting the in-game DMD overlay the PinballX DMD as it does with every other system, but I've been unable to determine a method to stop it from doing this.  Here's what I've tried so far:

• Toggled the value for hidedmd in the game xml files.  This has no impact on resizing of the VPX DMD.
• Tried setting this up in both the Visual Pinball  section, as well as the Custom Section under a VPX entry.  No impact.
• Tried toggling the custom game type from Visual Pinball to Custom.  No impact...somehow it still knows it's launching a VPX table and does it's regular meddling with the DMD size.

Is there a way I can get PinballX to just leave the DMD size setting untouched when it launches VPX?  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[byancey]

Well, it figures that the next thing I tried after posting my question appears to have worked.  

I made a copy of VPinballX.exe and re-named it VPBlah.exe and then changed my custom configuration to call VPBlah.exe instead of VPinballX.exe.  That was apparently enough, as PinballX doesn't recognize that it's running VPX, and hence, it leaves the DMD size alone when I launch a table. Everything appears to be working...but that's an observation based on very little actual testing.

While this appears to have worked, and I intend to move forward integrating Visual Pinball into PinballX using a renamed executable, I'm still not sure why it was necessary to trick PinballX into not doing something that I'm not entirely sure why it was doing in the first place.  If anyone has any insight as to why my approach might be a bad idea, I'd love to hear it.  More often than not, working around an issue in this manner often has a way of coming back to haunt me later.   For example...high score support, which I really haven't looked into yet, but am certainly interested in.

 

[Carny_Priest]

There is integrated support for Visual Pinball as well as Pinball FX2 and The Pinball Arcade to make things easier for users to configure and run for the vast majority of setups which attempt to do nothing out of the ordinary. PinballX will auto-detect if the executable is VP 9 or VP X and run its delays and bring different windows into focus as needed.

You are doing something out of the ordinary, so you would be better off setting up a Custom system for Visual Pinball with the System Type pulldown set to Custom. Then PinballX will not attempt to interfere. If you are doing whatever you need to do to get the system to run the way you want then it is not a bad thing. It just may or may not be as efficient as it could be, but it is not wrong if you are happy with it.

[byancey]

9 minutes ago, Carny_Priest said:

There is integrated support for Visual Pinball as well as Pinball FX2 and The Pinball Arcade to make things easier for users to configure and run for the vast majority of setups which attempt to do nothing out of the ordinary. PinballX will auto-detect if the executable is VP 9 or VP X and run its delays and bring different windows into focus as needed.

You are doing something out of the ordinary, so you would be better off setting up a Custom system for Visual Pinball with the System Type pulldown set to Custom. Then PinballX will not attempt to interfere. If you are doing whatever you need to do to get the system to run the way you want then it is not a bad thing. It just may or may not be as efficient as it could be, but it is not wrong if you are happy with it.

I assumed it was something along these lines...the only thing that surprised me was that in addition to setting the type to custom, I also had to rename the VPinball executable to prevent PinballX from jumping in and doing it's thing...at least that's what I observed in my troubleshooting.

In any case, I did come up with a second solution that seems to do the trick as well, and I think I prefer it to renaming the VPinball binary.  I threw together an ahk script that I launch using the Launch Before dialog.  The script waits for the DMD window to go active, delays a few seconds while PinballX resizes the window, and then jumps in and puts it back to the desired size.  This keeps the tie between PinballX and VPinball in place so that hopefully other integrated features will work as expected.

 

BTW.  Thanks for the quick reply to several of my recent posts!!!