stephen

SPOILER ALERT! (not really) OK, I've seen Ready Player One, and there is NO Joust.

Has anyone read / listened to Ready Player One? We went on a road trip through the US southwest and listened to it while we drove. Joust makes a significant appearance. I never realized that one player was on a stork. I just thought they were both ostriches.

FYI, I am doing the work on this for UltraDMD. I will have an update soon.

OK TiF that's pretty impressive, but how are you at Parcheesi?

Nice video.

Are you saying there a noticeable different between Yellow Label Difficulty 5, and Blue Difficulty 5? Or that there is a noticeable difference between the two on their default settings?

OK @TodayIsForgotten, don't you have some scores to post in the IGBOTY? JK I don't see myself matching that score. Good job.

335,550 I am not kidding. I was one robot about from clearing another level. And on my last guy, all I had to do was shoot that ONE robot, and the level started with me surrounded by grunts, not much room to move, and no clear shot - game over. I am convinced that the difference between difficulty setting 3 and 5 is how many grunts, and how aggressive they are.

OK, I updated my settings. While I was in there, I made it so I could spell out my whole name (it was the setting below the difficulty). 283,550 Like @ExedExes said, it's not much different. The only thing I noticed was, I died TWICE by being surrounded by grunts. I don't recall those grunts ever being so effective as to surround me, let alone doing it twice in the same game.

My votes (if I have votes to give): pull Nitro Ball from IGBOTY5 lives on Do Run RunBTW, seeing the scores for Nitro Ball, it seemed pretty obvious there was an exploit. As for the GameEx Nitro Ball high scores, we just need to ban the technique. If you remember, there was a similar exploit with Joust. See Joust GOTM. Two differences, however, I don't think you could do it indefinitely, and it took some skill to do it for an extended period of time. For the record, my Joust score did NOT involve the exploit.

I was just scanning the hi score threads and ran across this one. I just went over to Twin Galaxies and found this The Twin Galaxies Database Has Finally Been Restored!It's dated July 4, 2014.

I was so close to the high score. So I decided to try again. 268500

Dunno why the Hi-Score Snapper doesn't take an image of the whole screen on this one. So I took a picture with my cell phone.

I just found a screen snapshot I made back on August 3, 2013. Shortly after that, I lost my video. So I never followed up with submitting the score. If I recall, this game was a spinner game. Not a bad score for using a joystick. 33450

That's a perfect fine answer, especially since the whole thing is on the honor system. I would, however, request that it be stated outright, that "each player is on their honor to submit their score within a reasonable time after the game was played." And we'll just let the definition of "reasonable" be up to the player/team.

Well done. I wish I had time to play. I have about 4 projects going at the same time. No time.

This forum is magic. I messed with this for 3 hours and couldn't get it working. I post my question, take a break, and when I come back to it - I have it solved in 15 minutes. I'm still not sure why it didn't work before, but I now create the XDMD.Device on ActiveX startup instead of in the object instance (which is the correct design anyway).

I finally got around to dedicating some time to XDMD. I would like to create an out of proc ActiveX control to provide DMD support for Visual Pinball original tables. I am able to create a C# out of proc ActiveX control, call it from Visual Pinball VB script, and set break points in the ActiveX control. Straight forward. I am able to create a console app that calls XDMD to display the PinballX image (like in the XDMD Demo app, but within a console app). Cool beans. In the ActiveX control, I created a method called Test that would invoke XDMD to display the PinballX image (I made sure the "current directory" was where all of the DLLs and assets were located). I create the object in Visual Pinball script and called the Test method in the left flipper event handler. Results: A window appears in the middle of the display, but nothing was drawn (it was all white). When hovered over the task bar icon for the Virtual DMD I it said "not responding". My Test method spawns a thread to talk to XDMD. That way I can return immediately to VP. The thread has a while loop (like XDMD Demo) and looks for "ready". The PinballX transition takes about < 2 seconds. My code loops for < 2 seconds before the XDMD device becomes ready again. That tells me the XDMD Device Render is doing the right thing, timing wise, to schedule the animations. But nothing appears. I look at the modules loaded while running the console app and compared to the modules loaded within the ActiveX app. The ActiveX app loads all of the same DLLs. So I don't think it's a permissions/access, or search path, or GAC thing. Does anybody have experience which might point me in the right direction? I am hoping there is a simple and obvious solution that I hadn't thought of.

Sorry I wasn't around much this month. I really did want to participate. Time just got away from me; then family came into town. Congrats 70,000 is a pretty big score. BTW, I played one game of this today while waiting for the furnace repair guy, and I just noticed the Spinach. I lost my last life before I could grab it. I bet that would have been helpful to know.

The problem is with loading the mp4 file. It fails with VFW_E_CANNOT_CONNECT (0x80040217) in dsfutil.cpp on line 130. I can play invaders.mp4 in my Windows 7 x64 preview and in Media Player; but when I try to load it in the demo it fails. If I replace the MP4 with another MP4, I get the same result. When I replace it with a WMV, everything works fine.

Well, I had a chance to load up Popeye this evening. I'm in the 13000 range. I'll upload a score tomorrow.

VICTORY IS MINE!!!! After updating everything to .Net 4.0, I just needed to add a line to the App Config file <startup useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy="true"> Now the compiled demo runs to the same point as the downloaded EXE runs. Then it crashes with System.OverflowException was unhandled HResult=-2146233066 Message=Arithmetic operation resulted in an overflow. Source=XDMD Demo StackTrace: at XDMD_Demo.Form1.Main(String[] CmdArgs) in C:\xdmd\XDMD\XDMD Demo\Form1.vb:line 122 at System.AppDomain._nExecuteAssembly(RuntimeAssembly assembly, String[] args) at System.AppDomain.ExecuteAssembly(String assemblyFile, Evidence assemblySecurity, String[] args) at Microsoft.VisualStudio.HostingProcess.HostProc.RunUsersAssembly() at System.Threading.ThreadHelper.ThreadStart_Context(Object state) at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.RunInternal(ExecutionContext executionContext, ContextCallback callback, Object state, Boolean preserveSyncCtx) at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.Run(ExecutionContext executionContext, ContextCallback callback, Object state, Boolean preserveSyncCtx) at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.Run(ExecutionContext executionContext, ContextCallback callback, Object state) at System.Threading.ThreadHelper.ThreadStart() InnerException: At line 122 of Form1.vb SurfVideo = New XDMD.Surface(128, CInt((128 / draw.VideoWidth) * (draw.VideoHeight)), draw) This is because draw.VideoWidth and draw.VideoHeight are both zero.

I got everything building and targeting 4.0 framework. But when I run the demo I get System.IO.FileLoadException was unhandled HResult=-2146232799 Message=Mixed mode assembly is built against version 'v2.0.50727' of the runtime and cannot be loaded in the 4.0 runtime without additional configuration information. Source=XDMD StackTrace: at XDMD.Device..ctor(Boolean UseVirtualDMD, Boolean VSync) at XDMD_Demo.Form1.Main(String[] CmdArgs) in C:\xdmd\XDMD\XDMD Demo\Form1.vb:line 8 at System.AppDomain._nExecuteAssembly(RuntimeAssembly assembly, String[] args) at System.AppDomain.ExecuteAssembly(String assemblyFile, Evidence assemblySecurity, String[] args) at Microsoft.VisualStudio.HostingProcess.HostProc.RunUsersAssembly() at System.Threading.ThreadHelper.ThreadStart_Context(Object state) at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.RunInternal(ExecutionContext executionContext, ContextCallback callback, Object state, Boolean preserveSyncCtx) at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.Run(ExecutionContext executionContext, ContextCallback callback, Object state, Boolean preserveSyncCtx) at System.Threading.ExecutionContext.Run(ExecutionContext executionContext, ContextCallback callback, Object state) at System.Threading.ThreadHelper.ThreadStart() InnerException: So somewhere, I still have a reference to .Net 2.0. So, I tried moving everything back to .Net 2.0, but that just leads to compile errors, which I am having problems fixing. I long for the days of VBRUN100.DLL problems. I used to work at MS. I even worked on VS. I used to smile at people who thought that .Net was going to fix DLL hell, and the VBRUN problems. I'm not saying .Net is bad - but we just traded one problem for another equally egregious problem. Recommendations? I have VS 2010 and VS 2012 installed side by side. I have access to VS 2008, but I really don't want to install it too.

OK. I decided to start by just using the DLLs without rebuilding them. I get a divide by zero exception. I get this without doing anything in VS as well. If I download the 7Z, unzip it, navigate to "XDMD Demo/bin/release" and run XDMD Demo.exe. It displays the first two scenes, first with PinballX, the second with "Welcome to the XDMD Demo." Then it crashes. I am going back to getting the whole thing to compile. That way I can just fix any issues I find.

>>Express or the full version? Full VS. OK. So don't build the DLLs, just use them (basically, just build/change the Demo). I can do that. If I figure out the fix, I'll post it here.