DMD location

[Gilrock]

I spent a few hours trying to search forums and tutorials for positioning the DMD and found a lot of things that don't work. For now I'm only trying to run Visual Pinball driven by Hyperpin. So who is responsible for displaying the DMD? I thought it was Visual Pinball. I don't have my real DMD yet so I thought I'd try to display the DMD at the bottom of my second monitor. The problem seems to be that Hyperpin drives the display for the second monitor so I don't see how to accomplish this. And how do you make it display on the real DMD when I get that?

The setup on vpforums and a tutorial I found said I needed to overwrite the vpinmame dll with a 2.5 cabinet version then I should be able to open up a table in Visual Pinball and drag the DMD where I want it. So I tried opening up LOTR which I know displays a DMD on my playfield right now and I don't see a DMD anywhere in the design for me to move. I was able to change a ROL variable in the script which did rotate the DMD.

Is there a sticky somewhere that explains all this?

Gil

[DeeGor]

All of the DMD locations are stored in the registry. You can use setdmd to position them all in about 20 seconds. It's a great program.

[Gilrock]

I read through that page and there is no mention of how to display the DMD on a second monitor or 3rd monitor, or on a real DMD. And I noticed in another post that HyperPin has a UseDMD flag and position settings. I know a lot of you are running your DMD output positioned on a second monitor or on a real DMD but no one seems to want to give up the secrets how to do it.

Gil

[DeeGor]

You can with that program.

Click on the "Preview" button, and it should make a windows that simulates what your DMD looks like. Resize it to whatever you want, then drag the windows across to whichever screen you want. Typically screen 3. Once you're done positioning it, just hit the "Save as Default" button.

[Gilrock]

Ok great...I'm at work so I wasn't able to give it a try. It didn't mention anything about multiple monitors but I'll give that a try when I get home.

Thanks,

Gil

[Gilrock]

I got the DMD working on the 2nd monitor using the setDMD program but it was a pain in the a$$. That setDMD program has a lot of quirks. When I first ran it and clicked on the Install Roms... button it asked me for a rom location. I accidentally missed including a space between Visual and Pinball so it didn't fix any rom settings and it didn't complain about it. That's the point where you realize there is no way to get the program to ask you for the location again. So I searched for setDMD in the registry and found where I could fix it. So now after fixing that and re-running setDMD and trying VP I noticed the DMD size and location did change but it didn't move to the second monitor where it was located during the preview. I remembered all the posts about the location of screen 1 and 2 in the display settings to I went to check that. Mine had the 1 monitor on the right so I moved it to the left. Now when I started I didn't have a DMD anywhere. So I said ok let me go fix it in setDMD. I run setDMD and the window is gone. See I had moved the setDMD window to monitor 2 because it's easier for me to work on my backglass monitor and after swapping them in the settings the setDMD window is now displaying in outer space. I remembered seeing the position setting saved in the registry so I could have probably fixed it there but I just temporarily swapped my monitors back in display settings and then moved the app back to monitor 1 then swapped the monitors back again.

So now I finally got the DMD to display on monitor 2 but it was rotated wrong. I made sure the script for the table wasn't setting ROL...so far I found a couple tables where I had to comment that line out. Now I found another quirk with setDMD. I would click the preview button on/off and every time I clicked the preview button back on it would swap the height and width values so I wasn't sure which way they were really being used but no matter how I left it the tables seemed wrong. I found the only way to stop that weird preview behavior was to change the radio button that has None/Left/Right to be set to None. The other 2 settings cause the Preview bug.

So finally I got the DMD rotated corrected for all the tables I have running so far which in only like 16. The only problem right now is Lord of the Rings. The DMD is rotated and I've made sure its all commented out in the script so I'm not sure why that one table is different.

Another weird problem I had was the backglass was flashing but only for Attack from Mars. That was the original table where I was trying to drag the DMD around so I thought something had gotten screwed up in the settings. I wasted a lot of time trying to fix it and nothing worked. I deleted the registry settings for those roms and re-ran the setDMD program but nothing worked. I had to take my son to scouts so I left the house...came back two hours later...the PC had gone to sleep. When I moved the mouse the playfield monitor didn't activate so I lifted it up and hit the power button and got it back up. I start up HyperPin and the backglass flashing was fixed and everything working great. So I don't know what type of weirdness is going on in windows.

Also in the middle of all this I spent a bunch of time trying to make sure I had the right vpinmame.dll cabinet build. Mine said it was 3.0 but the instructions said I needed 2.5. The DLL I was downloading said it was 2.5 but kept reporting as 3.0 when installed. So then I tried the 2.5 version of pinmame and that worked but then I had the stupid splash screen. After searching vpforums I found somewhere it said that even though the cabinet dll was 2.5 it would be reported as 3.0 to avoid some other error message. So after reinstalling the dll a few times I couldn't run any tables because the copyright message would hang them up in HyperPin. I wasn't about to run every table in Visual Pinball again to clear the copyright message so I spent 30 minutes searching everywhere for a way to touch all the roms. Its not easy finding the right search words to figure this out. I finally found a message saying the solution was already in my hands...use setDMD. Unfortunately I had wasted all this time only to find out I just needed to run setDMD again.

I only post all this mess so maybe it will help someone else going through the same thing.

Thanks,

Gil

[LadyLuck]

You can with that program.

Click on the "Preview" button, and it should make a windows that simulates what your DMD looks like. Resize it to whatever you want, then drag the windows across to whichever screen you want. Typically screen 3. Once you're done positioning it, just hit the "Save as Default" button.

Thank you very much DeeGor.

I viewed a lot of Information in the web to put the DMD on the right monitor in the right position. And here I found the best and easiest solution.

It´s working

[svfuns]

You can with that program.

Click on the "Preview" button, and it should make a windows that simulates what your DMD looks like. Resize it to whatever you want, then drag the windows across to whichever screen you want. Typically screen 3. Once you're done positioning it, just hit the "Save as Default" button.

Thank you. I also encountered a similar case and have done it this way and solved.