vp-man better than vplauncher for visual pinball

[Mojorisin74011]

I recently discover vp-man which in my opinion works better than vplauncher for visual pinball and the reason why I say that is because you can use the arrow keys and enter to select a pinball game like you can with may so for my arcade cab and controls I don't need a keyboard. The only beef I have is that the visual pinball screen pops up in front of the actual table and so I have to minimize visual pinball to see the table and play.

Anybode have an idea on how to fix this?

http://vplauncher.rolandscholz.de/ from the same makers as vplauncher I think

[djrobx]

Why not just use GameEx on the visual pinball tables directly?

[Mojorisin74011]

Why not just use GameEx on the visual pinball tables directly?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I don't know how to do that and show all the pinball games if someone could please point me on how to do that I would appreciate it. Thanks

[djrobx]

GameEx comes with an emulator section with a Visual Pinball entry already configured. You just have to update the paths to point to vpinmame and your tables. The only thing that was time consuming was naming the screenshots to match the tables.

- Rob

[mightypeniz]

The only thing that was time consuming was naming the screenshots to match the tables.

Attached file: emuImageFixer.zip (EmuImageFixer.HTA)

This might be useful. I wrote it a while back, for this very purpose (although, it was for N64 or C64 or something else, not Visual Pinball.

Basically, it takes in the following inputs:

- dir of ROMs (or tables)

- dir of Images (snaps/screens/flyers/whatever)

- file extension of ROMs (eg .VPT)

- file extension of images (eg .JPG)

For each ROM, it goes through the images directory, looking for a (close) match based on filenames (alone, doesn't do any funky checksum matching or anything clever like that), and outputs the results to a table. It also makes outputs the contents of a batch file which you can C&P into notepad to rename the files.

Green = perfect matching image filename already found.

Yellow = one potential match found

Orange = multiple potential matches found (remove incorrect ones manually)

Red = No matches found.

Known issue: when processing large numbers of files, the script may appear to halt part way through. In actuality though, IE has popped up a prompt saying "this script is taking an awfully long time to run - are you sure you don't want me to kill it?" - just answer the prompt accordingly and it'll eventually run its course. (beware the prompt may be hiding behind the output window - just alt+tab back to find it).

Caveat: I'm not a coder's butt, so you can bet anything you like that this script isn't exactly optimised... but it does the job. Works for any emu/rom type too, of course.

Mods/improvements are welcome. Would be good to get a copy of any mods too.

Cheers ,

Brett (.au)

EmuImageFixer.zip

[djrobx]

I posted a similar utility a while back (SnapRenamer).

The Visual Pinball ones are the most difficult to match up, because each author uses their own naming conventions, and they're all over the place. The "version" numbes usually are somtimes alphanumeric, so it's harder to determine what information is relevant when trying match.

I got into the habit of renaming the tables to something clean looking for GameEx, and downloading the screenshots at the same time.

-- Rob