[RESOLVED] The LOADING screen shows on the backglass monitor

[pinfan88]

Hi folks,

I'm a newbie here and this is my first post (Hi!). Firstly thanks for PinballX, it's really cool.

I set up vpinball and pinballx on a 3 screen setup and everything worked perfectly with:

43" UHD LG TV for the playfield (set to 1920x1080 until I get a better graphics card)
32" 2560x1440 viewsonic monitor for the backglass
an old 15" LCD monitor for the DMD

My monitors are setup L to R for playfield,BG,DMD in windows10, aligned at the top, 100% scaling with the appropriate resolutions, all good. The various screens are destined for a cab but at the moment they festoon my dining room :).

My problem started when I had to replace my BG monitor due to dead pixels. I swapped it for an LG 32" 1920x1080 TV, and adjusted all the settings and everything is now almost perfect as before, EXCEPT that now when I select Play in pinballx, the screen that shows while vpinballx loads up (with white LOADING graphic on a black background) appears on the backglass monitor - sideways of course, since it should be on the playfield monitor. During this time the desktop is displayed on the playfield monitor. Nothing I can do changes this.

What I have tried:

1. Deleting registry settings for monitor setup and re-adding the screens one by one (I comprehensively purged the registry)
2. Deleting and reinstalling pinballx
3. Reinstalling the graphics card drivers
4. Changing the monitor layout to be vertically stacked (with appropriate cfg adjustments)
5. Turning off CEC on the BG LG monitor
6. Using the mouse to focus the LOADING screen and pressing shift-windows-cursor_left which does successfully move it onto the playfield, but it doesn't stick and next time pinballx is started it is as before.
7. As 6. but alt-F4 to quit the program after moving it
8. Changing every setting there is, both via the setup wizards and hand-editing the cfg files
9. Starting pinballx in windowed mode, with a view to dragging the window onto the playfield. When I do this I get a null pointer exception in the logs (or rather the CLR style "reference is not set to an object" exception). There is no traceback or anything else useful in there.
10. everything else

I always launch PinballX from the main monitor but the grey and blue PinballX splash screen (and LOADING screen) always now show on the backglass monitor.

I know people like to see ini and log files but believe me, I have changed the ini file at least 70 times in the last two weeks so any submission would just be the ini du jour.

What I would like to know is, what controls which monitor the LOADING screen appears on?

Thanks for any advice!

[pinfan88]

Just to clarify point 9 having re-read it, if I configure PinballX for windowed mode, then double-clicking pinballx.bat or .exe very briefly shows a window in the top left corner of the playfield (blink and you'd miss it), but nothing else happens. ie it fails to start up. Running pinballx.exe from cmd.exe does the same. In both cases the log file shows the null reference exception. I have registered the b2s, many times. Aside from this niggle, everything works fine.

Edited June 5, 2020 by pinfan88
add detail

[Draco1962]

Regardless, please locate and attach (no copy & paste) copies of your pinballx,ini and log,txt files for review. AND let the team here make suggestions BEFORE you make any more changes and only the changes suggested! This will help us help you better. Thanks!

 

 

[scutters]

when attaching the files please also confirm that the playfield screen is set in windows as the main / primary display. You've probably done it, but it's worth double checking.

[pinfan88]

Ok, I have attached the files. Forgot to mention my monitors are [3][1][2] in windows, with [3] (the playfield monitor) as the main monitor.

[3] (43" LG, 1920x1080) is attached to the GT1030 by HDMI
[1] (32" LG, 1920x1080) is on the motherboard graphics using displayport->HDMI cable
[2] (dell lcd monitor 1280x1024) is using a VGA cable from the motherboard

I notice that the PinballX splash screen initially appears on the playfield monitor for a split second but then moves to the backglass monitor.

Also the monitor numbers in the .ini don't seem to correlate with windows. I have a feeling windows somehow remembers my old BG monitor.

When I right-click the windows desktop and select Display settings, it is always monitor [1] that is highlighted in blue, not sure if this is relevant. [3] is definitely the main monitor (have tried changing and then switching back).

Thanks for any help

log.txt PinballX.ini

[Mike_da_Spike]

Can you also post a screenshot of your windows display settings ?

[pinfan88]

screenshot attached. Number 3 is the main monitor (but I can't get everything showing at once without upping the resolution)

cheers

 

[Tom Speirs]

Hi,

Ive not seen this before. The immediate thing that comes to mind though is you have the default full screen windowed disabled and are using full screen excusive. Please change that. It will definitely make your problem easier to troubleshoot. Thanks,

[pinfan88]

Hi,

I have fixed it! The solution was to boot into the bios and go to video settings, in there there is a setting for the primary graphics with options for Auto, IntelHD (motherboard) or Nvidia. I changed it from Auto to Nvidia, which is my playfield monitor, and rebooted.

After that, my displays show up as [1][2][3] in windows, so I had to reconfigure them in PinballX, but the splash and LOADING screens now display correctly. Another side effect was that all the sound came out of the playfield TV, even after tweaking the vpinball audio prefs. The solution to that was right click desktop, display settings, select sound, and select the primary sound device to be my main audio (headphones in my case as it's plugged into the headphone jack). Then change the vpinball audio prefs, reboot, and voila! Everything is perfect again. 

Thanks all! 

[Draco1962]

Congrats on finding the solution and thanks for sharing back just in case someone else runs into the same problem!

Since you unlocked the HDMI audio in the process, you may be able to leverage playing ambient sounds as discussed here and, especially if Tom creates the feature in PinballX the same as exists in GameEx.

 

[pinfan88]

Thanks for the tip and glad I could share the solution. I scoured the forums and didn't find anyone who had had the same problem. Probably when I replaced the viewsonic monitor with the LG backglass TV, the bios "auto" graphics decided that the new TV was the latest thing and chose it as the primary graphics device.

Wrt audio, I now have it working as I want, which is for the flipper/bumper/etc sound effects coming out of the playfield TV, and all other pinmame/music out of the main cab speakers. This should be quite realistic sounding when it's in the cabinet. I am building the cabinet completely bespoke (winging it) with the width dictated by my widebody lockdown bar, the depth according to the side rails (that hold the glass) and TV, and the height by the DMD and backglass monitors. I do have a real pinball machine (CFTBL) which I can refer to for things like overall height, flipper button positions etc.

Might run a thread on the build when I get some more materials.

[Draco1962]

Good idea splitting the audio with playfield sounds coming from the playfield monitor speakers! Well done!

 

35 minutes ago, pinfan88 said:

Might run a thread on the build when I get some more materials.

When you do, please start a thread sharing your build details or at least a link to a blog and/or videos and post it here to share!

https://www.gameex.info/forums/forum/41-gamer-rigs/