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JSpradlin

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Everything posted by JSpradlin

  1. This may have been addressed before, but I couldn't find it. After updating to the later versions of PinballX (currently 3.29) my directB2S backglasses no longer display in attract mode. I get just a blank black screen on VP games while I get the default PinballX screen with Future Pinball (which makes since on FP). Any ideas? I have never used recorded videos for VP always relied on the backglass files. Thanks.
  2. At any rate I think I'm good to go now. It was just a chore. At this point it shouldn't be too terrible to maintain. Thanks for all of your feedback.
  3. My assumption or understanding was that the Wheel Image, Flyer, Instruction Card names had to match to the game name not the game description. Was I wrong in that? When I named my game files using author and such with the description "Table Name" ("Manufacturer" "Year") that is when I had trouble with files not matching. If it matches to game description with file matching off then I just wasted a ton of time renaming my table files (ugh!) Anyway, I ended up just naming my table files exactly like my descriptions. Then to keep track of the version/author, I just created a couple of custom property tags under Windows and saved them there. I love PinballX. It's a great piece of software, but that file matching stuff is the bane. Oh well.
  4. Yeah Yeah. The only problem with that is I like to be able to see the version I have quickly so that when I check to see if anything new has been released I can tell without opening the table in VP/PinballX. I think I'm just going to go through and add a couple of properties to the file details (author and version) in Windows so I can check it that way but still name the file simply. This will be easy to maintain after the pain of initial setup.
  5. I assume file matching has to be on for this to work. Is that correct?
  6. This might be a dumb question, but can instruction cards be multi-page?
  7. One other request. Can we get an update to file matching. It has become my nemesis in PinballX. The dilemma I have is when it comes to table naming I have a system that file matching sometimes stumbles on. My format is... table_name (manufacturer year) author version eg. Ali (Stern 1980) JPSalas v1.3 The problem I have is that with file matching off I have to name may media files exactingly. This creates a real hassle because if I update a table I also have to change the name on every related file. Conversely, with file matching on I'm theoretically able to just name my media files "Ali (Stern 2003)" and it should match. This works fine except when there are similar file names. For instance PinballX matches "Ali" to "Alien Star" on instruction card....and don't even get me started with all the tables that start with the word "Black." For some reason, once file matching hits a space in the table name it's hit and miss on matching the following unique characters. I'm almost to the point where I have to name the tables simply like "Ali (Stern 1980)" and keep track of the version info in a spreadsheet which I don't really want to do. If this has been addressed before I apologize. Thanks.
  8. I'm not sure if this has been requested before, but would it be possible to increase the limit on the number of images that can be read from the Company Logo media folder. The limit seems to be 60. While I realize this seems like more than enough, I am actually at the limit as I have multiple manufacturer logos for many of the companies based on time period. Thanks.
  9. Thanks for the response Carny. I figured that out by testing testing and moving some things around. I guess I should have checked back here first and saved myself some time. The limit appears to be 60. I may have to request an update if it's not hard to increase. But since I'm probably the only person here bumping into that limit I don't think it'll be much of a priority.
  10. Additionally I did a bit more testing that has really left me confused. One of the tables that isn't displaying the company logo is America's Most Haunted. It is the only table that uses the 'Spooky Pinball, LLC' logo. I tried changing the name to simply 'Spooky' and updated the XML. It still wouldn't display. So I tried changing the <manufacturer></manufacturer> entry to one of the Gottlieb logos and it displayed fine. This leads me to believe that the problem has to do with the logo file itself and not the name. This is odd for two reasons. First, the logos were working fine a couple of days ago. Second, they don't seem to be any different than the logos that are working. All logos are what I would consider standard PNG files. I even tried opening the logo in GIMP and reexporting it with the usual PNG settings and still no luck.
  11. So I have been working vigorously to get my cabinet set up as completely as possible. I have been going through and removing duplicate tables and trying to make sure I have all media - wheel images, flyers, company logos. And the latter is where I'm suddenly having an issue. I decided that I wanted to be as thorough and exacting as possible, so instead of just having a single company logo for each manufacturer I have logos corresponding to the specific time period that the machine was created. I differentiate them by giving them unique names. The following are some examples. Bally Bally Manufacturing Company / Bally Manufacturing Corporation / Bally Midway Manufacturing Company / Bally Midway Manufacturing Company Gottlieb D. Gottlieb and Company (Gottlieb) / D. Gottlieb and Company, Columbia Pictures / D. Gottlieb and Company / Premier Technology (Gottlieb) Stern Stern Electronics, Incorporated / Stern Pinball, Incorporated / Stern Pinball Williams Williams Electronics Games, Incorporated / Williams Electronics Manufacturing Company / Williams Electronics, Incorporated This was working in my cabinet for a while but then out of the blue certain manufacturers would show me the "No Image" logo. This may have happened after a program update, but I'm not completely sure. However a computer that I had a a different location for testing and setup while away from the cabinet continued to display the images properly. That is until last night when I updated to PinballX 2.50. Now I'm having the same issue. The strange thing is that my old PinballX.ini which I saved previous to the last update doesn't really appear to have any different settings than the new one (at least not settings that should affect logo display). What's even stranger is that some of the logos still display fine. For instance the Bally and Gottlieb sets seem to all display, while the Stern and Williams don't. Because of this, I can't see a common thread that could be causing the problem. I originally thought that maybe the names were not unique enough, but that would seem to be a problem with the Bally and Gottlieb images if that were the case. I also thought maybe PinballX was having a problem with the commas in the names, but again, some of the Gottlieb files work fine with commas. When this first happened on the cabinet, I tried shortening the names to abbreviations. I tried SEI and SPI for Stern Electronics Incorporated and Stern Pinball Incorporated and the images still wouldn't display. I'd really like to get this resolved as I have put a lot of time into finding/making the unique company logos and researching to proper logo associated with each machine. I've included a screen shot of my Company Logos folder contents, my PinballX.ini file, and a few screen shot of my database files to show a few tables that are't showing the logos. Thanks, J PinballX.ini
  12. So I read that if I changed the name of the PinballArcade11.exe file to PinballArcade.exe it would launch as DX11. I did, and clicking on this file directly did indeed launch in DX11. Apparently this is temporary as it changes back when Steam updates. This is fine as I really only need it to test. The problem is that renaming it and updating the Settings.INI file did not solve my problem with the FreeCamMod. I still get the following warning and the TPA does not go past the Click Enter page.
  13. So the DX9 vs DX11 thing seems to be an issue with how the game is launched. I was testing this on the free version of TPA through Steam that only has the TOTAN table. After investigating this issue on the Steam message boards I found that the only way to get the DX11 version to run (at least when using the free table feature) is to hit Play in Steam. You are then given the option to choose between DX9 and DX11. Choosing DX11 this way does give me the DX11 version. However if I try running PinballArcade11.exe from the C:\Steam\steamapps\common\PinballArcade directory it always launches DX9. This may all be because I'm trying to use the free version. It's a shame they only offer table packs. I'd be fine paying $3 to test a table, but I hate to drop $30 only to find out I can't get this working.
  14. Am I also correct that if I run dxdiag from the command prompt the line... DirectX Version: DirectX 12 ...under the System tab indicates that my video card is running DierectX 12 or is that just the latest version installed on the OS? In other words is this displaying the capabilities of the OS or is this indicative of my display drivers? The Display tab makes no direct mention of DirectX Version.
  15. So it turns out that PinballX does not like quotation marks in the Description field (even when using the &quot; syntax). Four tiny little lines create a big hassle.
  16. Am I right in assuming that if dxdiag reports DX12 and my .NET is up yo date it should run in DX11?
  17. Yeah I figured. I have an older copy from about a 3 months ago to compare it to. It's just missing more recently installed games (of which there are a number). It's a shame I don't have an easy way to just show the lines in the files that are different. I'm sure that can be scripted, but It would probably take longer than just eyeballing. Update: Actually found an ahk script to do this. Hopefully that will make the process faster.
  18. Would it be possible to get a feature that would password protect access to a specific group of tables (such as those deemed mature). There may be other ways of handling this such as ahk, but they come with issues like problems with focus and applying to all tables in a specific database. Instead of evaluating each table in the database every time a table is launched, what I would like to see is a way for PinballX to prompt the player for a password (button sequence on cab) when a group of custom tables is selected from the menu. If the player enters the correct combination the group would then launch as normal, otherwise the player could get an incorrect passcode message (optional maybe) and be returned to the group menu. Thanks.
  19. I edited my database XML files by hand for Future Pinball, VP993, VPPM5, and VPX. I needed to change many occurrences of a couple of tags and figured doing it by hand would be faster than using Game Manager. After editing PinballX would just bounce me back into Windows once started. So I tried loading each database in the Game Manager. All of them loaded fine except for the VPX file. This database gives me an error about an illegal character in the file. Is there a quick way to locate a typo/illegal character, or am I stuck eyeballing the entire XML?
  20. Yes I did. Steam is already running, and I launch the script as admin. The only thing that I did notice that was odd was that when I click by the "outside process" dialog box, the bottom right corner of The Pinball Arcade shows DX9 rather than DX11. I doubt this is causing the confirmation box to pop up, but I suspect it could cause other problems. I checked my .NET framework which is up to date, and I ran dxdiag to check my DX version. It showed DX12. I assume that's good. Maybe I'm still missing something needed to run this whole process, but I'm not seeing it.
  21. So I tried simplifying the whole thing just to get it to work. I mad my ahk file simply... Run, C:\TPAFreeCamMod\TPAFreeCamMod\TPAFreeCamMod.exe -table TOTAN, C:\TPAFreeCamMod I'm not sure whether or not I really need the Working Directory portion since I'm providing the entire path to the target file, but it doesn't hurt to have it regardless. When I run this simple script with Steam already running, I get the message box at the right of the screen saying TPAFreeCamMod found the Pinball Arcade process (or something to that effect). However, at that point I get the Steam message box mentioned by another user earlier in the thread about an outside process trying to run the program through Steam. When I click to allow it, it launches the Pinball Arcade, but it stops at the "Click Enter to Start" screen rather than going directly into the table. I hardcoded TOTAN into the table call because I wanted to cut any variables out of the equation and then build on a working script.
  22. There are ahk decompilers that can take the EXE and decompile it back to an ahk file. I searched google and found a couple. I'm not sure what the policy is here on posting links or recommending programs like that so if you want to know the specific one I used I can PM it to you.
  23. I tried the script, but no joy. It kicks me back out to Windows, kills my task bar. And locks my system yp the point that I have to reboot. Here are my files and setting if someone wants to give it a look. Hopefully I'm just doing something dumb. Settings.ini TPArun.ahk
  24. You can use NukeLauncher in PinballX to accomplish this. There's a thread on it here.
  25. The two scripts were one which I created myself to run Steam offline without getting the offline warning dialog box every time and the NukeLauncher script. As mentioned earlier in this thread, NukeLauncher.exe is really a compiled AutoHotkey script. Earlier Carny suggested that I may want to edit the script to solve my exiting problem. While I was able to solve that problem by editing the INI file, I used his advice to fix the "Good News" message box problem. I found the part in the NukeLAuncher script that called the message box and commented it out. I would have preferred to run the EXE as it was created, but since everything else worked fine I figured this was the quickest fix.
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