MORTAL (pinball) KOMBAT a build thread.

[Luckydogg420]

Massively off-topic but has anyone tried using a 3d tv for hyperpin?

I don't know about using a 3D tv for the playfield. I haven't heard about this yet. If your looking for a "3D" experience there is BAM (better arcade machine) that renders the image to look 3D from the players perspective by using head tracking software. This looks very interesting to me. But I think you need to wear a pair of glasses frames with an IR led installed in them. I also think this works only with future pin, not visual pin, fx2 or pinball arcade. (Someone with more knowledge please correct this if I'm wrong)

The next step would be an Oculus rift. They should give you a 3d picture. ....I don't like this idea, although it's probably amazing. Something about standing at a cabinet playing a game that only you can see; but you can't see the cabinet either. Seems pointless. Just build a controller and put it on the counter it you want to go that way.

I do see 4k tv's being used for playfields. Eventually. Even though they have the ability to up convert a HD signal to 4k this might cause game lag, a game killer for pinball. You probably need a crazy large graphics cards card to do this in the computer and software that can process it properly. My guess is years away.

So BAM or an Oculus rift. Both will cost a couple hundred dollars to get running. And even then your going to probably be limited by software.

[momentarydogma]

Massively off-topic but has anyone tried using a 3d tv for hyperpin?

I haven't seen anyone try it, but I honestly don't think it would work very well... I have a 3D TV in my living room and you basically have to be directly in front of it for it to work at all. If you're sitting at any sort of angle, the effect is greatly reduced. For that reason, I don't think it would work at all for the playfield-- it would work for the other monitor since you're looking directly at it, but that would be pointless since you'd have to be wearing glasses when you have your eyes on the non-3D playfield. The angle that you'd be viewing the playfield is the exact wrong place to be viewing a 3D LCD. Come to think of it, I don't think you could even do 3D in portrait mode.

[Luckydogg420]

Well I made the mistake of putting the tv into the cabinet to "test" things out..... and then just started playing games, instead of getting any real work done.

Then I had a side project to do quickly. My Boss' wife called me on a Tuesday night, and said that they "might" want a mame cabinet for their sons birthday, the following Thursday. They were still thinking about it, and were wondering the cost ect. She seemed very excited and just wanted to talk with her husband (my boss) about it. She said she'd get back to me by Friday. Like a Mame cabinet is easy to build in a week. Fortunately I have been in the hobby for a while and had an empty cabinet in my garage. It used to be a blackjack game and would work nicely for a small 2 player machine. I also had an ipac2, 17" LCD, two joysticks, and a bunch of buttons laying around. So I decided to get the cabinet as far as I could with parts that I had on hand. The empty cabinet was found on the side of the road months ago....like some people think this stuff is trash. I re painted it with supply's from the pinball machine. Black and red, it's a classic. I then went to walmart and bought 2 posters to add the graphics.

Here's a quick before and after I didn't document the process, but ask if there's any questions.

[Luckydogg420]

So back to pinball

With the cabinet together it wasn't long before I wanted to have the DMD screen working so found a cheap solution that worked for me. I purchased a USB-VGA adapter to run the third screen.

http://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=44_563&item_id=057646

This worked well. I was able to drag and drop the DMD image onto the third and size it properly. Time to load up the software and get this thing running.......

[Luckydogg420]

It wasn't long after loading a few tables and playing a few games that I decided to improve the graphics card. The PC that I bought came with a GeForce GT 610 2gb. This works better on some tables then others, but during multiball things would get hard to keep track of. The balls would jump across the cable. On fast shots around the loop the ball would be gone and impossible to track. IMHO. Software is my weak point and I'm sure that this machine could have better performance with some set up work done to it.

So I decided to upgrade the graphics card. After looking at other peoples build threads I noticed the 660 was used by others. This seems to be the next level of graphics cards without spending $700 + on a card. This is the one that I bought.

http://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=43_1200_557_559&item_id=053246

It's easy to see the difference in the two cards.

This should be awesome time ten.

[Luckydogg420]

SOFTWARE. SOFTWARE. SOFTWARE.

Here is where everything falls apart. I turn on the table and something isn't right. Giant sections of the playfield are missing. Flashers are just big blotches. All playfield art is missing. Different things happen in different tables.

This seems to be software related, but it works awesomely without the USB-VGA (3rd screen) plugged in. I don't know, haven't looked into it yet. Sometimes it all works fine.

I attempted to set up hyperpin with one table... It gets the table and backglass graphics, but the game won't launch. The file paths are right. I've set up hyperspin on mame systems before, so it should be right. Haven't looked into it yet.

My plunger/nudge set up isn't working 100%. I didn't use the default button configuration in the instructions when I wired it up,(see previous posts). and I haven't re programmed VP to work with my setup. The flippers and nudge work well enough to play pinball well. The coin button doesn't work yet. The mechanical plunger isn't working in VP either. There's a bit of configuring that I haven't spent any time learning yet. Seems to be that some script needs to be added to the tables and setting it up needs to be done also.

Some of my tables that have the b2s backglass' have the speaker panel in the graphic. So I need to fix that. Also other tables don't have b2s backglass in their script, so I have to learn how to add them.

My ledwiz isn't working properly. I have 5 RGB flashers in a bar, 2 of them a on red constantly, so I have it unplugged. I was "working" for a minute then shut off....so I probably screwed up something with my wiring. I'm going to draw up a schematic to sort it out in my head. I'm pretty sure I have all the right software in the right place. Hopefully I didn't mess it up when I connected the ledwiz to the booster board or when soldering the flashers onto the resistor board, I really wish it had through holes like the other one.

And I assume that there's an optimum way to set up windows to run a cabinet. That I'll need to think about.

But at least I'm playing pinball. I've got 25-30 tables working individually, and they work well.

[RenegadeFred]

Progress is always good. - Nice little mame cab there.

So the 610 didn't cut it.. Why not use it as your secondary card for the DMD? B2S - easy to remove the speaker panel from those. I believe you either left or right click on the b2s screen then the options should come up.. something along the lines of "Grill-less" should be what your wanting. Adding B2S is an easy edit per script per game. Seconds to do really.

Do you remember what tables didn't perform very well on the 610? I want to test them on the DirectX9 version of VP. I got a chance to load up some tables earlier with the test version and most of the tables were in the 150-200 FPS range. No micro stutter but I didn't play long enough to get multi ball sessions to max them out. But with your new card that should blow those numbers out of the water..

[Luckydogg420]

I had only tried the GeForce 610 with ghostbusters and wooly. I didn't play with it to long, and I assume if someone knew anything about tweaking the system they could have better performance. In VP the video options changed it a bit, think I un checked the box's for (I think) "ffx" and "hardware something". (I'm not in front of the machine while weighting this) It was worse on the gb table, but it could have been software related. There was a preloaded copy of asus windows software (with all the crap installed with it) on the computer. That video card can only register 2 monitors and the bios wouldn't allow me to turn on the integrated graphics while a video card was installed. So I needed to do something better.

I tried the usb-VGA converter for the 3rd screen, but that really messed with things. As soon as it was plugged in the nvidea control panel software stopped working properly. Something is not compatible. Here's 2 pictures of creature from the black lagoon. The ramps are solid in one, and transparent in the other. I'm not sure what was causing this to happen, but assume its from the 3rd screens USB-VGA device.

[Luckydogg420]

So, I got a new motherboard.

Now I will be able to run both cards at once. The GTX 660 for playfield and the GT 610 for backglass and DMD. I also plan to do a fresh install of win7. Not the asus windows recovery disks. This should fix all problems that I've been having.

[RenegadeFred]

I have similar issues with my arcadevga3k I have to run VP in 16 bit mode instead of 32 cause of the graphical issues. Perhaps the USB-VGA is messing with the primary video card settings? Now that there's been work on a DX9 port of VP I don't think the 610 will hold up well unless as you stated - its tweaked. The card doesn't run high enough FPS in Future Pinball for me to want to keep it as a primary either.

Hopefully now that you have a new vid card / mother board things will click into place. Best of luck with the rest of the build!

[boogies2]

THOUGHTS of what is happening:

The USB card uses the CPU - and that is bad for the GPU. The GPU recognizes 3 monitor and trys to allocate the memory. The problem is that the USB is not even using the GPU.

REALITY of what is happening:

I have heard nothing but bad things with all USB video ports being used as third monitors. Kinda late now, but I believe that if you have MB with only 1 PCI-E, it might be cheaper to get a Real LED-DMD with a PinDMD2 (approx $400) than to upgrade the MB, CPU and add the video cards. If starting fresh, the dual PCI-E is the most economical (with powerful results) way to go.

Running VPinMame in the third window doesn't require too much, and your 610 might be adequete. Try the 610 with only the DMD. Use your 660 for the PF and the BG. I am using a 480 for the PF and BG and it's been running every table at full speed. I believe that a 480 and 660 should be pretty close in a comparison of GPU power.

[Luckydogg420]

It's a very happy day for me.

There has been a good quality FS version of Dungeons & Dragons released on vpforums. Awesome. D&D was my last real pinball machine before I built my vp cab. In fact, I sold that machine to begin funding my virtual build. Very happy.

My software woes are almost done. I haven't installed my ledwiz yet, but other than that I'm almost done. There's a problem with b2s back glasses loading on screen 3 instead of screen 2 (although it looks right on the settings) and then a problem with hyperpin freezing when I exit tables with b2s backglass'.

I'm paying some bills, then going to work on the cabinet graphics soon.

But the next step for me is to remove the playfield screen and wire up the lights for buttons (start,exit,coin,ect).