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Flash.ocx - swf instruction cards


Carny_Priest

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Hi, I'm revisiting this old project for a miniDMD window and flash slideshow viewer on the apron:

I generated a bunch of media last year for the project vectorizing cards from PDF-based sources, cropping to the correct factory size, etc.

Sadly, I found after generating all this media that that most were not viewable in PinballX. Most factory cards are black text on white background. And these display as all black in PinballX. They look good when opening in a browser or using whatever specific Flash ActiveX component that AutoHotkey taps into. I'm guessing that's the Flash Player plug-in that you may install into IE or perhaps comes with Windows 10. I noticed that PinballX installs Flash.ocx and I was wondering if a different version may work to display these cards.

Granted, if I try to re-open or place any of these files in Adobe Illustrator it tells me that the file is in an unknown format and cannot be opened. The image looks corrupted if I try to extract images using swftools. It's bad since I'm using Illustrator to export into swf format in the first place. And it will not read in what it is writing out. Similar deal with Office Libre. Frustrating.

All the media is up on the FTP in the folder references in the link above. 

It's not a total waste of time if it turns out that there is no good solution. I can write a script to display in a flash viewer upscaled to 4K and capture it to png and they will look fantastic. However, my backglass is 16:9. Because PinballX scales png images, those captures will not look quite right if the user is running something different like 16:10 or 5:4. The script can be modified and the collection re-captured but it would be easier if the swf files could be viewed directly.

Thanks.

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Ok, I figured it out for myself. I'm new to graphics programs, and I did not know that Adobe considers the white background transparent. And PinballX applies a black background when displaying cards, so black text on a black background will not be viewable. Having an option to change the background color to white would fix it for the work I've done so far, but it would be no good in any other context. I'd still prefer black background anyway.

Maybe I'll get around to fixing these cards at some point.

Please mark thread as resolved.

 

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