[Resolved] Text at the bottom of the screen is suddenly missing

[SixOfTwelve]

I don't know when exactly this happened, because I generally don't pay much attention to it, but it seems the text that scrolls past at the bottom of the menu ("Featuring xx tables" / Name of the current game / " Free Play" and all that) has disappeared.

I'm using a 3-screen setup: 1920x1080 playfield, 1600x1200 backglass and 1024x600 DMD screen. Certainly didn't have the problem a few days ago, but I can't pinpoint exactly when it happened.

Other than that, PinballX is running perfectly, with VPX, VP9, FP, MAME, Windows games and RetroArch happily coexisting.

Not sure about the version number since it's not being displayed anymore, but my pinballx.exe is dated 21-03-2022.

I've attached the PinballX.ini and log.txt - if anything else is required I'll gladly supply it.

Thank you!

PinballX.ini log.txt

[scutters]

You're on the latest version (5.41) and log & ini look ok to me.

Does other text appear ok (menus etc), and were you using a custom font in the pinballx\media\fonts folder?

[SixOfTwelve]

Thank you for your reply. Other text (for example when starting a game) is displayed normally.

Could it be a DirectX or VisualC++ issue? I've recently added a few old (i.e. originally intended for Windows 95/98/XP) games and their installers sometimes included old versions of the runtimes. Could those have overwritten something? Also one of the games (Adventure Pinball: Forgotten Island) needed a 3DFX wrapper (https://www.zeus-software.com/downloads/nglide) - could that have screwed something up?

EDIT: Installed a Visual C++ all-in-one pack (https://www.techpowerup.com/download/visual-c-redistributable-runtime-package-all-in-one), installed the latest Windows 10 updates and did a complete reinstall of PinballX. No change so far.

[scutters]

All i can suggest is to enable 'show date and time' in display settings to see if pinballx shows date time on the playfield screen, might point to something if that does or doesn't show .

To be honest i don't know, maybe @Tom Speirswill have more insight

[SixOfTwelve]

Date and time don't shop up either. BUT! As soon as I switch to windowed mode, the text (scrolling as well as date/time) shows up, so it's some kind of problem with the full screen mode. Also, it doesn't matter if I go windowed or non-windowed fullscreen, the text is still invisible.

Windowed:

 

Full screen:

[Mike_da_Spike]

@Tom Speirs

Any idea ?

[Tom Speirs]

It could be the disk space/temp folder issue that has come up in the past.

I believe the bitmap font is created and saved to the temp folder.

[SixOfTwelve]

 

Clearing out the temp folder did the trick! Thank you so much!

[Mike_da_Spike]

Just curious, what was the size of the  available disk space on the volume of the tempfolder ?

[SixOfTwelve]

I'm using a 1TB SSD that's not even 25% full, so disk space was never the issue. My guess is that either me or my kid must have crashed PinballX at some point, and that may have created corrupted temp files.

[Mike_da_Spike]

Gotcha ! 

I also blame my (grand) kids if something wrecked at the cabinet 

[SixOfTwelve]

Kids are the best beta testers though, because they do things that would never occur to you!

A game crashes the frontend because the kid is impatient and presses the exit key five times before the game has loaded properly? Time to finally add BlockInput commands to your AHK start script.

[Mike_da_Spike]

2 hours ago, SixOfTwelve said:

Kids are the best beta testers though, because they do things that would never occur to you!

Well, don't forget Mrs DA Spike as well  
When she is playing (with or without the grandkids) she can wreck my system as well !
 

2 hours ago, SixOfTwelve said:

A game crashes the frontend because the kid is impatient and presses the exit key five times before the game has loaded properly? Time to finally add BlockInput commands to your AHK start script.

Why using an AHK script to exit emulator ? 
PinballX takes care of exiting all my systems that I setup on my cab

[SixOfTwelve]

10 hours ago, Mike_da_Spike said:

Why using an AHK script to exit emulator ? 

PinballX takes care of exiting all my systems that I setup on my cab

I don't rightly remember, to be honest. Hitting the exit key didn't always work for everything (especially older Windows games and similarly exotic stuff), so one day I switched to adding the AHK scripts for certain systems and it just worked. Never thought to question it, never had the time or the nerve to change it (shrug)